Heart of the Trainer: Zapdos
by MightyDesoto
Summary: Some believe legendary pokemon are born when the life of a Pokemon Ranger, a human with the soul of a pokemon, ends. For one pokemon ranger, life on the streets is a living hell, filled with killer pokemon, haughty aces, and a rookie cop bound to get them both arrested. Can he find something worth living for or will his legend end with his name? (Orig. Story)
1. Chapter 1

**Chapter 1**

The punch was clumsy but it was faster than the last one, hammering a dapple tattoo into the side of Zach's face. He could have tried to avoid it, but it wouldn't have mattered. He had neither the training nor the reflexes to do more than see it coming. His assailant probably wasn't any better but youth had its advantages in a fight.

It also had its fair share of assholes.

Today, there were three of them. A real dodrio of the neighborhood's finest heads come together. They were healthy educated, well-learned young men, studying the fine arts of recklessness, beer pong, and short-shorts. Just old enough to slur the line between community nuisance and criminal without catching any of the responsibility. Zach only hoped his cheek bone was sharp enough to cut the boy's knuckles as they raced by. He fell into a collection of tin trash cans lining the side of the alley, denting one and knocking over another. The cheap supposedly lemon scented bags ripped against the rusted edges of the cans, spilling their contents across him.

Curdled cream belched a historic expiration date into the alley and the three boys leading the assault reeled back as if hit with a _poison gas_. They waved shiny poke-watches in front of their noses, gaining more steps to their workout with each swing.

"_Ugh_," the boy in the center groaned, careful not to accidentally stick himself on the manicured red spikes in his hair. "Is that from the garbage or the old man?"

Zach propped up on an elbow. Old man? Since when was 55 the cusp of geriatric retirement? Sure, salt and pepper dashed his hair, but the lines running his face were scars, not wrinkles. Then again, age didn't matter. Not to the young and stupid. They saw one thing and one thing only when they looked at people like Zach:

Homeless trash.

And they would be right.

Born without a diploma or pleasant disposition, Zach didn't have a coin or credit to his name. He slept on the streets more than he walked them and dug in dumpsters for the latest discarded fashions. The streets were rough and they were mean, but once in a while, they took care of him. Like today. Zach couldn't have fallen into a better spot:

A pile of overloaded trash cans the day before weekly pickup when the odor was most offensive. Smell was his best defense when hiding or running wasn't an option. The more putrid the pesto from last night's take out, the better. Nothing like the fear of contamination to keep the overly groomed at bay. Too bad noxious vapors didn't have any effect on the sandshrew scratching the gritty asphalt with its foot. Back alley toxins weren't exactly effective against a tournament trained tank. Sandshrew jumped on Zach's back, flattening him into the slick black puddles of yesterday's refuse and rainfall. His venomoth eaten overcoat buckled under the _tackle_. The oversized rat felt extra heavy.

What were they feeding it, lead? Souls of the innocent? At least Zach didn't have to worry about that last one.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" Spike yelled though his sleeve. He dared a step closer, pokeball in hand. Zach lifted his cheek from the asphalt.

That didn't sound like the Spike he had come to love to hate.

"You'll catch its stink. Get off!"

Now, that was more like it.

Sandshrew swiftly dematerialized and surged back into its pokeball. Spike rubbed the plastic coated metal against his shiny leather pants to remove any defilement before he released his pokemon again.

"Now, I have to give you a bath, you little shit," he grumbled.

Zach lingered on the ground and picked a knot of yesterday's spaghetti from the tongue of his worn out baseball cap. If he didn't get up, they might think he was unconscious.

"Think he's dead?" the boy on the right with the overly sized sunglasses asked.

That was even better.

"_Naw_," the wannabe rock star on the left corrected. The navy blue dye job in his hair had bled down his scalp to paint his eyebrows a lighter shade of douchebag. "He's just playing diglett in the sand."

"I say we dig him up then," Spike proposed. "Whadaya think Shrew? Want to play in the sand a little more?"

Caught in the bluff, Zach rolled over and sank into the nearest black trash bag, hoping to camouflage himself from their displaced daddy issues. He touched the blood pooling in the far corner of his eye and watched it run down his finger. Red seemed to be the color of the day.

He didn't like this trainer. Not one bit.

Thunder suddenly cracked overhead, darkening the already shady business in the alley below. A storm was about to break. The latest news broadcast warned of a long and powerful string of storms coming in from the west. Spike dabbed the tender points of his hair and glanced at his cohorts. They all shared the same unspeakable taboo concerning the dampness of their cones and curls. Even Sandshrew was anxious about getting his bald and beautiful head wet.

The first droplets began.

"Let's get out of here," Spike urged before the sky broke loose, but it was two punches too late for the sucker. A downpour started within seconds and the three were soaked before they reached the end of the alley. A white watery haze blurred both ends of the slum, shortening the world to one pile of trash and the garbage beside it.

Zach pushed himself to his feet, catching his balance in the middle of the alley. Raindrops shattered against his head, back, and shoulders, framing him in a stormy halo. He turned and looked down the alley where the three boys dashed across the street through the rain. They wouldn't find refuge from the storm anywhere around here. They were on the wrong side of the tracks for that. They were on the wrong side of everything as far as Zach was concerned.

Pokemon trainers.

The bastards.

Those patronizing self-absorbed spoiled brats were always looking for a fight, even when there wasn't one to be had. Another pale of thunder rolled across the city, cracking sharply at the end where lightning kissed the earth. Zach looked up at the grey swirl blending sea and sky together. He took off his hat, closed his eyes, and smiled. If there was one thing in this world that always did him right, it was a good storm. It cleared the people from the streets faster than a bomb box, washed him and his clothes without charging a coin, and best of all;

It drowned out the voices in his head.

No more giggling, whispering, laughing, crying, bickering, screaming, yakking voices beating his ear drums every minute of every day. No more snickers and scoffs to add insult to injury when the beatings began. The rain washed it all away. Pelting, beating, drilling, and hammering those relentless complaints and squabbles to nothing more than a background hum. And the thunder, oh the precious cracking growling booms that deafened him to silence.

Sweet, sweet silence.

Zach removed his hat and rubbed a hand over his face, scratching his fingers through the short whiskers around his chin and mouth. One sweep of his hand slicked back the majority of his hair away from his face. Long at the top and buzzed short on the sides, the zig-zag across his temple could almost pass as intentional. The drifter dreaming of sheering his way into fame and fortune was particularly drunk the day he offered his services to the "hatless gentlemen of the world", free of charge of course. Zach fitted the baseball cap back on his head.

Never again would he leave home without it.

The rain showed no signs of slowing, so Zach shoved his hands through the holes in his pockets and trudged through the pelting white sheets toward the main road. To say he walked was a generous accommodation to the lump in his left knee. The bones never healed quite right after a particularly nasty ace trainer smashed in his kneecaps. Apparently, the big shot didn't like being called a "no good warmongering titty trainer" by a good-for-nothing louse.

"Don't lump me with those pussy footed playground school boys," Ace had shouted upon hearing the insult. Evil lustful warmongering being the least of his concerns. "I'm an Ace and don't you ever forget it!"

Ace's pokemon used up all of its PP driving the lesson home, but it was Ace's talent with discarded construction lumber that really struck the homerun. Zach paused and rubbed the leg above his bad knee.

He would never forget good old Ace. The rain wouldn't let him.

And if the news channels were right, the system would last for days, drenching the city from satellite dish to sewer drain. Flash floods would ransack the streets, create mayhem on the roadways, and offer Zach a little peace from the hustle and bustle of city life. But despite the storm's best intentions, it couldn't smoother out everything. Sometimes, the voices still trickled in, and today, one voice in particular cut through the rain as sharply as the lightning above.

It spoke loud and clear, obsessing over one thing and one thing only:

Murder.

The petty outcries and distracted mumblings that normally milled about Zach's brain couldn't hold a candle against the power of those whispers. Nor was the voice familiar. They usually came and went, always chiming in on the most random and inappropriate of subjects when their opinions were most inconvenient. Some agreed with him. Others despised him. Even more couldn't care less about him, babbling on about random idiosyncrasies that never made any sense.

But this voice was different. It was serious. Dead serious. Personal.

Murder. The word itself tickled a primordial nerve in Zach's brain, causing his heart to reflexively kick out since his knee wasn't good for it. He paused, wide eyed, in the middle of the sidewalk just outside of the alley.

He had been down before; kicked, and spit, and pissed on. Outright cold and angry and desperate to the world, doing things he couldn't. Thinking things he shouldn't. Vengeance filled many a pleasant night's dream, but killing in real life?

Zach listened, waiting to see if the voice would speak again. He held himself breathless at the thought of what it might propose next. Had his psychosis finally turned him into a psychopath? Did Spike and his merry band of men deal enough experience for him to level up and evolve to the third and final stage of insanity?

None of the other voices offered any clues and that scared Zach even more than the word itself.

Something suddenly crashed to the ground nearby. It clanged sharply against the ground, wobbling like sheet metal in a poor imitation of the thunder above. Zach lifted his head and looked up through the smoking rain into the alley across the street from him. Something stood next to the trash cans. A pokemon by the looks of it. With four long lean legs and a body to match. No horns, appendages, or embellishments to easily identify it with. It was black, or at least, the gloom made it black by darkening its silhouette with evening shadow.

Zach pulled up the collar of his jacket.

Why was he so jumpy? It was just another lost cause like himself. A feral pokemon abandoned on a whim. Emboldened by the rain, the pokemon didn't run upon being sighted. It stared at him. It challenged him to come a little closer, but Zach had enough fighting for one day. He scoffed and turned down the street away from the alley.

Pokemon.

They were even worse than the trainers.


	2. Chapter 2

**Chapter 2**

Spike was dead.

That much was certain. Spectators pressed against the police tape quarantining the alley, straining for a better view of the body. The blood. The carnivores.

Zach preferred a much leaner greener diet. He slipped his hand into the nearest unzipped purse and found fruit ripe for the picking. Nobody cared for the misdeeds of the living when there was a dead body to be had. All Zach had to do was position himself a foot or so from the front lines and the unsuspecting mob filled in around him. It was one of those rare times when their eyes were on something other than their coin purses.

Zach had no problem capitalizing on the dead. Someone needed to punch the people's ticket for this macabre show. Otherwise, it was a waste of a good death. Although, Spike might have disagreed if he still had vocal cords to speak from. His throat was ripped open and his blood blended with last night's backwash. A break in the rain kept it from running into the sewers and the local retention pond.

A white sheet covered the carnage from public eye but Zach caught a glimpse of it when the police were still securing the scene. The cuts were so fine that wet shreds of flesh blossomed in several layers from Spike's neck. Not a piece of him was missing. Not one bite consumed. Every ounce of blood was retained in a pool around him, glistening like black ice from a frozen over hell. Every part of the body was wasted. His death was purely killing for killing's sake.

Murder in its truest form.

Zach stuffed his hands into his expanding pockets and feigned interest in the show. He had to maintain appearances if he wanted to continue foraging uninterrupted. Diluted blood stains crept up the white sheet where the edges touched the ground. Red spots grew from beneath the fabric around Spike's neck where the rain kept the wound from drying. It was a terrible, awful, lonely, painful way to die, drowning in your own screams for help.

Good riddance.

Zach wiggled a finger in his ear, closing one eye as if to help it travel deeper into his brain. The voices were especially loud today, both inside and out. Death had a way of tickling the fabric of reality and agitating the subconscious. Especially one as messed up as his. There was no better way to create, maintain, and end madness in Zach's opinion, although, the boys in blue did their best to contain it.

Various police personnel stood around the alley, all straight and official like, holding the buckle of their belts as if waiting for a chance to brandish their pokeballs in front of the crowd. People weren't killed by pokemon as often as they used to be, and if they were, it was normally during the middle of some circuit tournament and televised for the entire region to see. Not outside your local convenience store. The brutal and exciting mystery drew in as many locals as first responders. The red and blue lights kept spinning even though the scene was already picked clean. There were no witness to the crime, no statements to take, so all the police could do was mill about and pretend to know exactly what was going on.

All except one.

This officer had no problem sporting her ignorance. She was young, born with a plain face and perpetually blushed cheeks. Compared to the beer guts and muscle heads surrounding her, she was short, thin, and petite, but sturdy in her own right when compared to the crackheads and hookers normally strutting the alley. She was a rookie by the looks of it. New to life as much as the force. Innocent fascination still glittered in her eyes. Dreams of justice and virtue filled her every ambition. She was still just a baby.

A baby dressed in blue.

Baby Blue's uniform was spotless. Dutifully ironed and shined every morning. She flashed the badge pinned to her chest like her smile, proud and ever conscious of its presence. Every strand of hair was tightly pulled into a bun under her checkered cap and not a single blemish stained her shoes. She looked like she just stepped off of the graduation podium at the academy. Stepped off of the platform right into the biggest pile of dysentery the city had ever shit out.

Murder cases were a great way to get a rookie's feet wet, especially with the backsplash of their own vomit. Most weren't prepared for the ruthlessness awaiting them on the streets. Forensic photos in the academy training room weren't soaked in the blood, guts, and bile that pushed through every orifice of the body when someone got crushed or run over. You didn't feel the passion of murder until you stood over the body in the same place as the killer, wielding the murder weapon as evidence and wondering how you would have done it differently.

The rancid stench of death spooked many officers into keeping a safe distance. It scared even more right off of the force. The glory and honor of public service revealed in one horrifying empty pale faced expression. Some trainees even jumped right out of their boots when they saw it. They ran home before their shift was even over. Zach scored many a memento and good memory those days. But Baby Blue kept her shoes tightly laced. She loyally trailed behind her training officer through the gruesome details to their post without a single gag. But as the minutes ticked by and nothing happened, her nervous enthusiasm settled into confusion. She didn't understand why everybody was standing around, doing nothing, from one side of the crime scene to the other.

The crime scene tape was more than enough to hold back the crowd so officers wandered amongst themselves and huddled in groups trading gossip. Detectives loitered around the crime scene unit van, safe guarding their future promotions and dismissing anyone who wasn't wearing a rain coat and tie. The forensic team had finished taking photos and samples. There was nothing left to do until the coroner, who was presently stuck in traffic across town, arrived. Stalling for time until the next shift change became a priority for all those involved. All but one. It was an hour Baby Blue wasn't willing to waste. The scales of justice had tipped and were in desperate needed of balancing. She took it upon herself to muck about the city's filth for answers.

Baby tip-toed around puddles and shinned her flashlight into their depths to see how far they went. She patrolled the perimeter, nosed around evidence tags, and talked to anyone who would listen. She asked questions nobody could answer, inquired about the investigation in a way that wasn't her job, and quickly ostracized herself from the company of her fellow brothers in arms.

Shoulders turned at her approach. Eyes darted from her glance. To indulge a pestering rookie with their company was an embarrassment no seasoned officer was willing to take. Cast out by the living, Baby Blue moved on to the dead. So far, Spike's corpse offered the warmest of greetings. It was probably the nicest he'd ever been to anybody. Nobody cared how close Baby got to the body as long as she didn't tamper with anything. Her rank made her invisible and that was something Zach could relate too.

What he didn't understand was how Baby picked him out of the crowd the moment she looked up from canvasing the scene. She furrowed her brow and pegged him as suspicious within seconds of spotting him. It was an egregious violation of his character, spawned by an over exaggerated stereotype concerning his appearance. Zach might have been insulted if it wasn't absolutely warranted. He was shady as hell and guilty of a few misdemeanors to boot. More importantly, Baby Blue wouldn't break eye contact. She was dead set on approaching him.

Time to make a full retreat.

Good thing disappearing was his specialty. Zach stepped back and the mob quickly took care of the rest. A late arrival spotted the sudden vacancy and muscled his way in. The people shuffled to accommodate him. Zach fed a shoulder into each step, sliding backwards with every shift forward to keep the chain reaction going until he popped out of the back.

Baby Blue stopped at the police tape. The density of the crowd blocked her way to the other side. No matter which way she leaned or how high her heels went, she couldn't see past the swarm of faces pressing up against her. It was the first time a uniform came within speaking distance since the tape first went up. A surge of questions assaulted Baby about the case. One or two anti-government activists waiting for the chance to start a riot tossed in a few remarks ridiculing the police's response to the scene.

The jeers escalated from there, mixing a bit of poison into the pot of laughter, sobs, and whispers stewing on the other side of the line. Baby Blue considered spraying a can of repel into their mouths. The people were worse than a cloud of gastly wagging their tongues behind a haunted mirror. To dive into their judgments without protection would paralyze even the strongest of wills.

Zach softly cackled to himself from the back of the crowd. There wasn't a checkered cap in sight between the bumping shoulders and bobbing heads. It was yet another successful getaway. Too bad he couldn't leave the voices behind so easily. His earlier chuckle heightened the laughter already in his head, causing the voices to bounce around his skull with new vigor. They echoed and twisted. First, into snickers. Then, into sobs. One of them suddenly screamed.

Zach slapped his hands over his ears and stumbled into the brick wall of a nearby building. He squeezed his eyes shut until the mental supersonic subsided. He dropped his hands, breathless and exhausted from the strain. The usual background chatter came as a relief. He should have known better than to come out with the crowd. These sorts of gatherings always aggravated his condition and created more discord in an already unstable mind.

One giggle was more than enough to derail him. Ear plugs didn't help. Drugs made it worse and booze was too expensive. The only thing he could do after an attack was brace himself for the next one. Zach staggered away from the wall and stuffed his hands into his pockets. It was an unconscious habit meant to hide as much of himself as possible when an episode began.

Normally, the sensation comforted him, but today, his pockets weren't empty enough to hold the baggage. His fingers bent up against the sharp points of the jewelry, coin cards, and wallet clips. They cut his hands in several places. Zach cursed and pulled out his hands, mumbling curses until he ran out of letters in the alphabet. Several coins dropped to the ground in the process, expanding his vocabulary into a completely different langue. And the more he spoke, the louder, sharper, and more judgmental the voices became.

Zach abandoned the stolen treasure and left the scene in an effort to escape them. Several frightened bystanders hurried out of his way. They stared with the same annoying persistence as the voices. Zach pulled down his hat to block their prejudice and licked the blood off of the back of his hands.

Behind him, Baby Blue squeezed out of the back of the crowd. She had become as invisible to them as she was to her compatriots when it became clear her lips were as tightly laced as her boots. She caught a glimpse of a black shadow as it turned the corner out of the alley.

With a quick adjustment of her hat, Baby boldly marched after the suspicious person, but by the time she rounded the corner, there wasn't a black baseball cap in sight. Several people wandered the streets, drawn in to the alley by the excitement, but none of them seemed disturbed by an unsightly passerby. Untouchables were exactly that, in mind and body. Undeterred but in need of a little help, Baby put a hand to the pokebelt strapped around her waist.

Two blocks down, Zach put a hand to his ear. On the street, in the alley, by himself, or in a crowd, there was no escaping it. The voices kept coming. They fluctuated irregularly like bad reception on a radio, scratching and blipping from one thought to another. Jaded insults, backhanded comments, and nonsensical chuckles flippantly toyed with his sanity between the static. Each one reminded him that his life was no better than the corpse he had left behind.

"Shut up," Zach growled, clawing his hands into his hair. "I said shut up!"

"Stop!" one of the voices shouted back.

In an instant, the other voices scattered into hiding. Zach stopped and opened his eyes. He looked down at the ground and dropped his hands from his head. A poochyena stood in front of him, poised to strike with nubby nails and snaggletooth if necessary. He stood maybe a foot from the ground on short stubby legs made thicker by the unshed puppy coat wrapped around his body. It wore a blue collar with "POLICE" written in bold across it. Zach curled up a lip.

"Get outta my way, mutt," he sneered. "Or I swear to God I'll kick you harder than a football."

A voice dared him to try, but another quickly cut in, this time, from behind.

"Stop!" it called.

Zach looked over his shoulder. He should have checked for whiskers this morning when he woke up because he had a tail, and it was surprisingly blue. Baby struggled with the cut in the chain link fence quarantining the private alley from the rest of the world. Having never trespassed before, she tried to push through the break instead of folding it back. Climbing through a briar patch might have been easier and less shameful for the rookie.

"Stop right there!" Baby continued. Luckily for her, she was small enough to squeeze through the gap without getting stuck. She cleared the fence, but lost her chance at regaining any dignity when one of the wires caught her uniform and tugged her to an abrupt halt. Baby reached out with one hand and fumbled around the snag with the other.

"Wait just a second!"

Zach turned his back and left. Given the magnitude of Baby's failure, Poochyena couldn't decide whether to help his trainer or chase down the suspect. But given his lack of thumbs, he choose the latter, and to his advantage, he was more bark than bite. Every accusatory yip broke through Zach's fingers no matter how hard he pressed them against his ears. He stopped and looked down at his feet again. Four paws and two boots quickly dashed in front of them. Baby bent over and put her hands to her knees. One of her blue-green eyes winked up through the blonde hair that had fallen from her hat. Her cheeks were redder than usual. Sprinting a 100 yard dash sure seemed exhausting. Zach was glad he never had reason to.

"Why didn't you stop?" Baby asked between huffs.

"I don't stop for cosplayers," Zach firmly announced, pushing forward with the invisible barrier his handicap created. Baby shifted out of the way and looked down at her uniform. When the insult finally kicked in, Blue turned red and she quickly hopped into stride with new determination.

"I'm not a cosplayer hooker," she quickly clarified. "I'm a cop."

Rookie mistake number one: failure to announce police presence. He'd have a lot of fun with this one.

"Oh, so you're the police?" Zach exclaimed. He bloated the statement with so much sarcasm that it floated right over Baby's head. She brightened with a smile. "In that case-,"

Zach briskly turned on his heels and walked in the opposite direction. Baby nearly tripped trying to keep up with him and Poochyena haphazardly avoided the kick promised to him earlier. Zach couldn't move fast but he had mastered the sway of his gait and knew how to use it. Baby almost bumped into him and Zach prayed another push would send her reeling.

"Am I under arrest?" he spat.

"Ah-Well . . . no," she stuttered.

Baby paused, realizing her second rookie mistake of the day: admitting she was on the verge of harassment. Zach tried to put as much distance between them as possible. Whatever they were teaching at the academy, it didn't include a course on real world practicality. Baby had a lot of growing up to do if she wanted to survive these streets and Zach didn't want to be around when her cherry popped. It would be an absolute bloodbath. He almost felt sorry for her.

Almost.

Baby quickly returned to his side.

"I'm not talking to you," Zach declared, unwilling to spare her even a glance.

"But you haven't heard what I have to say yet," Baby exclaimed.

"Don't care."

"But what if it's important?"

"It's not."

"But-,"

"Go away."

"I-,"

"Get lost."

Baby stopped. Zach's resentment was so bitter it puckered her lips. This was a battle she couldn't win and they both knew it. Maybe she'd turn tail and run? But it was too good a thought to be true. Baby ran out in front of Zach, hairball hot on her heels, and blocked the way with an outstretched arm.

"Here," she said, opening her hand to reveal one gold coin, three silvers and half a copper. "You dropped these."

Zach looked at the coins. It was a trap. It had to be. There was no way she was that naïve. She was fishing for information about the case and his presence in the crowd, baiting him into revealing his involvement with Spike yesterday afternoon.

Something suddenly changed in Baby's expression. Zach didn't know what it was but it sure felt like pity. She looked off to the side and tilted her head down as if weighed by an uncomfortable responsibility. "You know," she began, much softer than before. "I know of a place with a lot of nice people who deal with all sorts of things without asking a lot of questions . . . "

Zach raised an eyebrow. Could she get any vaguer? It wasn't until those typhoon teal eyes came back around that it struck him. Baby was one of those rare breeds of people born with a _keen eye_. She saw everything: the wince he made when his tongue touched his busted lip and the string of abuse that started when little Dorothy Samuels punched him on the playground after he refused to give up his fruit snacks; the inflammation edging the cut on his cheek and the decision to sweat out the infection instead of getting treatment at a clinic he couldn't afford.

She saw a man standing in front of her. A soul calloused by banishment and ridicule. Every drop of sweat and speck of dirt proof of his endurance. Black from finger to foot, his overcoat carried all that he owned. His bulging pockets were proof of his profession. He was a criminal. A thief. A survivor. In her eyes, he was innocent until proven guilty. No mask, stereotype, conjecture, assumption, expectation, or long standing bigotry could tell her otherwise. When Baby looked at him, she didn't see what he was, but _who_ he was.

How dare she.

Zach clenched his teeth and his fangs practically cut across his lips.

"Keep your pity," he snarled. "I don't need any from the likes of you!"

"How dare you!"

Zach looked down at Poochyena.

"Shut your damn mouth!" he shouted. His eyes darted across the road, trying to catch the voices as they fled from him. The pidgeotto sitting on the power lines scattered. Rattata ducked into their dumpsters. "All of you can just go to hell!"

Zach's frustration landed on Baby again. Her eyes were as wide as saucers. It was then that Zach realized his own mistake. He clamped his hands into fists. So what if she heard him talking to the voices in his head? Everyone else assumed he was crazy. Who cared if she actually knew it was true? Baby was just another face. Another set of blue lights waiting to go off the second he stepped back into civilization. She'd condemn him just like the rest of them. She'd take him to that place she knew with the superficial nice guys who didn't ask a lot of questions because they only needed to ask one to have him committed:

Are you insane?

Baby would take him for all he was worth. Zach slapped the glittering coins from her hand. She recoiled as they scattered across the street and filled her fingers with the safety snap covering the holster on her duty belt. Poochyena darted between them and bared his teeth. Zach unzipped a grin. The air was so hot and muggy from the rain that it started to make him sweat. Either that, or the fever was getting to him. He glared daggers into that gold badge shinning a light onto his psyche.

Baby was just like all the others. At least now she had a reason to arrest him. The voices were nastier in prison but seeing that look on Baby's face was worth the torment. Maybe he would keep an eye on her when he inevitably got released after all. He'd like to be there when she finally stepped in over her head. A little blood never killed anybody.

The seconds ticked by, tolling like bells at a funeral. Who would tuck him in tonight? The bite of a pokemon, the pop of a gun, or the jolt of an electrified baton? Surely, Baby had a few toys strapped to that tightly bound waist of hers. She did, just not the ones Zach expected.

"I'm sorry," Baby quickly said, cheeks blazing with embarrassment. She stepped back to give Zach some room, ignoring the coins on the ground at her feet. "I must have been mistaken."

No. Baby was not like the others.

Rain spots darkened the pavement. The pitter-patter of rain began on the fire escapes above. A drop or two brushed past Baby's face, causing her eyelashes to flutter. She looked up away from Zach at the sky. Rookie mistake number three: never take your eyes off of the suspect. At that moment, Zach knew could do whatever he wanted and she would never see it coming. He could throw out a pokeball; pull out a knife; murder her where she stood. And there wouldn't be any witnesses. If he acted now, no one would ever know.

Innocent until proven guilty.

The voices came back all at once, shouting and screaming their way back into existence despite the storm's resurgence. Zach quickly turned away and pressed his head into his shoulders. The voices demanded that he apologize. Leave. Stay. Once again asking, interjecting, and intruding on his life with their incomprehensible babble: Wasn't Baby nice? Wasn't she terrifying? The rain felt good. Did Mr. Oliver forget to put the lid on the trash can again? Baby's still watching. Are you gonna eat that? I thought I told you to leave me alone. Better get it before it molds! I like her.

I should kill her.

The voice from yesterday had returned.

"Are you alright?" Baby asked, edging closer to the black shadow curling away from her. Zach ripped his hands away from his head and gasped for air. Sweat dripped off of his nose and his body trembled with a chill. Had Spike knocked something loose yesterday when he threw him out with the rest of the garbage? It was the only explanation to the rising madness. Something soft touched Zach's back, calming the shudder in his frame.

It was Baby. Her hand was far too gentle for a cop.

Zach looked over his shoulder at her. The storm raging in her eyes could have rivaled the one rumbling from above. She was scared, as she should be when faced with a stranger capable of turning on her as much as himself, but she didn't pull back her hand. Just like those damn coins.

Innocent until proven guilty.

God damn it.

Zach shrugged her off and slowly limped down the road. This time, Baby didn't follow. The rain began to pick up. It would drench them all sooner rather than later.

"Go home," Zach said, remembering how Spike had tried to outrun the last downpour. That white sheet was probably completely red by now.

"I wouldn't want you to get your hair wet."


	3. Chapter 3

**Chapter 3**

Two more crime scenes popped up over the next twelve hours, rounding out the day's body count to an unlucky three. Training officer Michael "Guppy" Guerra had a feeling it was only going to rise but making it through the next twenty-four hours to find out was debatable. His newly assigned rookie had a bad habit of tapping her pencil against the table when she was thinking and she was thinking all the time.

In the short spurts between solos, she gnawed on the wood hard enough to give herself lead poisoning. Sometimes, she even took to twirling her pencil between her fingers and there was more than one hole in the ceiling to show for her talents. It wouldn't be so bad if she actually wrote something down every once in a while but Guerra was pretty sure her brain was disconnected from her hands. Maybe even her entire body.

It often moved of its own accord despite every rule and instruction he'd given her. It was the first time in Guerra's entire career that he had to check the passenger seatbelt in the squad car before every shift to make sure his rookie didn't try to jump out before the brake lights cleared. Toddlers in strollers at the zoo weren't even that impulsive. If he wanted to babysit, he would have applied to the local daycare.

"Did forensics find anything yet?" rookie officer Annie Cofield asked, twiddling her pencil again. The instrument of torture suddenly flew from her fingers, across Guerra's face, and landed on the other side of the squad room.

Rookie Officer Cofield also had a bad habit of sitting in the front of the squad room.

Guerra closed his eyes to the backdrop of several murmured chuckles. Annie quickly cleared her throat and retrieved her weapon of mass destruction without further embarrassment. She knew the answer to her question anyway. It was the same one Guerra had given her the past two hours: No. No and no again.

It was still too early to come to any conclusions regarding the recent murders. Tests took time. Analysis were expensive and three back to back deaths had the press knocking on the station's front door. The stakes were too high to risk leaking false information. Murder was hot news on a normal day. Multiply it by three and even the top brass was sweltering, especially when the coroner's preliminary reports indicated that all three victims died of the same MO: lacerations to the neck, punctures to the base of the skull, and compression injuries to the chest. They were injuries consistent with an attack from a very large, very powerful, physically based pokemon, but that didn't rule out foul play between humans just yet. People used pokemon to do their dirty work since the first pokemon domestication back in the Stone Age.

"But don't you think it's strange?" Annie continued, unable to stay silent for long. "All three victims have almost exactly the same profile, like they were targeted. Their hair, their clothes, their age, how much do you wanna bet that they belonged to the same social circle?"

"Sure," Guerra droned, playing along with his rookie's delusions. She wouldn't stop otherwise and the only thing worse than her pencil tapping was her talking. "I bet they even went to the same hair salon." He had never seen such gaudy work outside of the circuit before: red spikes, blue dread locks, what was next, flaming highlights with real flames?

Annie stiffened with a gasp.

"I didn't think about that," she said. "What if you're right?"

A sudden, somewhat devious, but unquestionably brilliant idea came to Guerra's mind. If Annie was so obsessed with these cases, then why not let her work them? It didn't matter if the lead was bogus or not. That wasn't the point. False alarms, dead ends, and prank calls were a part of the business. That was the hard lesson every rookie had to learn in this job. It was the nature of the beast. He was doing Annie a favor, breaking her in early.

"I've got an idea," Guerra suddenly exclaimed, leaning in close. "Why don't you ask around the local salons to see if they recognize any of the victims? They might be able to give us some new information. It'll take me a while to sign out the unit, protocol and all, but you can get a head start on foot. There's a popular stylist just a few blocks from here and I'll pick you up when I'm finished."

"But the briefing-," Annie tentatively began before Guerra quickly came up with an excuse.

"The higher ups expect us to do this sort of thing," he explained. "It's only a matter of time before they march down here asking for that kind of information. Just think of how impressed they'll be to see we already have it?"

Annie beamed with the responsibility.

"Well, what are you waiting for, rookie?" Guerra asked, dressing his best smile. He did love a good funeral. "Those stripes don't earn themselves."

Annie jumped out of her chair so fast that she hip checked the corner of the table before dashing out the door. Guerra didn't bother readjusting it. He simply put his hands behind his head, leaned back in his chair, and closed his eyes with a sigh. The officer sitting behind him slapped his back with a notepad.

"You're evil man," he snickered. "Pure evil."

"I'm not evil. She's just gullible," Guerra replied, picking up the pencil she left behind. "She'll realize soon enough and come running back. This is an important part of the training process too."

"Atten-TION!"

Every officer in the room jumped to their feet in customary xatu fashion as Sergeant John Lipton walked into the room, portfolio in hand.

"Hang onto your dresses, ladies," he announced, coming up behind the podium. "This is going to take a while." He immediately looked at the empty spot in the front of the room. The only real lady in the unit wasn't in the room. "Where's Officer Cofield?"

Already aware of his responsibility to answer, Guerra spoke up.

"She forgot to bring a pencil, sir," he said.

"Right before a briefing?" Lipton asked, eyeing the device spinning between Guerra's fingers. Guerra shrugged. Sergeant Lipton leaned a little harder into his podium. He didn't like a dirty house, especially when he had company, but there was no time to clean it up. Several members of the brass walked into the room, followed by an attorney and two agents from a federal organization. They officially closed the door on the matter when they locked the squad room and announced that everything said from this point on was on a need to know basis.

The results of the three murders had finally come in:

Precinct 336 officially had its first serial killer.


	4. Chapter 4

**Chapter 4**

Bobby Miller, Pete Donnahugh, and Peter LaFrey, were dead. Their toe tags said as much, but the three shared something more than the cold slab chilling their corpses down in the morgue. They were also friends, and it only took three salons, two barber shops, and a couple miles of poverty to prove it.

"I know them," barber Kenny Miles, local talent and hair cutting enthusiast, explained as he looked at the pictures Officer Annie Cofield presented. "People in these parts call them the midtown boys."

And apparently, they had a long standing hobby of harassing the homeless.

"Those boys would come into my shop, laughing and carrying on about those poor folk on the corner," Kenny continued. "It was wrong, the way they treated them. I saw it myself a few times and told them I wouldn't do their cuts anymore if I caught them again, but they just moved on to where I couldn't see them."

It was the first real lead Annie had in hours.

"You see, those boys struck it big in a team battling tournament held downtown last year. They were good enough to win but not good enough to ride the circuit. Won enough to change their clothes but not their zip codes, if you know what I mean."

Annie understood perfectly. Second rate pokemon trainers too lazy to work but too addicted to the game to admit they didn't have any real talent made up most of the assault, nuisance, and disturbance calls received by dispatch back at the precinct. Practicing a _tackle_ through your neighbor's fence or torching the local grocery store didn't settle well with the locals.

"Thank you Mr. Miles," Officer Cofield said as she wrapped up her notepad and tucked it back onto her belt. "If you think of anything else, please call the number on that card."

With another ring of the entryway bell, Annie closed the shop door behind her. She paused under the small red and white awning to fasten the hood of her poncho around her chin and checkered police hat. She never meant to stray so far from the precinct, but when the first salon didn't know anything and referred her to a barber shop down the street, and they to another, and another, and another, she couldn't help but follow the bread crumbs before they went stale. Her appetite for investigation was just too strong to go unsatisfied.

Lightning strobed overhead. Annie looked up but didn't bother counting the seconds between the flash and the following thunder. She wasn't afraid of going out in a storm. Her poncho kept her dry and the lightning kept its distance. Getting struck by lightning was reserved for only a special few and she wasn't important enough to reunite heaven and earth like that anyway.

A steady stream of water dribbled off of the edges of the awning. It hadn't stopped raining since yesterday and wouldn't for the next couple of days. Floods were expected to carve new gutters and ditches into the streets by the end of the week. They'd wash the streets clean and sweep away anything unattended, including a handful of coins, without bothering to consider what any of them were worth.

Annie looked down at her hand and imagined the gold, silver, and copper coins that once filled it. The man in the black baseball cap from yesterday had neglected to tell her that he knew the first murder victim. Black eyes and busted lips didn't dispense themselves after all, and given the midtown boy's reputation, she'd bet her wages they were the source of his injuries. But was Mr. Black Baseball Cap at the scene of the crime yesterday as a victim enjoying the sweet cycle of karma or the killer reveling in his work? What if it was both?

Annie clenched her hand into a fist. The only way to clarify Mr. Black's involvement in this case was to find him and question him about it, properly this time.

A bright white bolt suddenly cracked across the sky, splitting the sound barrier with an ear shattering boom. Several car alarms went off. A customer inside the barber shop screamed and the street lights flickered down the block. Pet pokemon started howling and barking across the entire neighborhood. Annie quickly trotted out into the street, searching for any signs of fire or destruction caused by the strike.

The rain dampened any sign of damage, not that there was any to begin with. The lightning struck the top of a large nearby building that rose above the smaller rows of apartment complexes and storefronts in front of it like something out of a horror novel. Lightning rods at the top created pointed spires fit for a swarm of ghosts. The thick flat sheets of metal it was made of wept rust in the rain, mourning the days when its face used to shine. Filled with cobwebs and shadows, the only thing missing was the organ music.

Reynold's Power Plant shut down several years ago after an explosion killed 13 workers and injured 22 others. Safety and health investigations discovered that the catastrophe could have been prevented and the resulting lawsuits crippled the company. With millions of dollars in fees and fines, the plant never reopened, Reynold's went bankrupt, and a jurisdictional disagreement prevented the dismantlement of the facility. The abandoned plant quickly became the skyline's biggest resentment ever since. It was empty, isolated, and the perfect place for someone to sort through the voices in their head.

It was a bread crumb too tasty to miss.

Annie jumped onto the sidewalk and looped around the neighborhood until she came upon the padlocked front gates of the power plant. Two oversized quarantine signs met her at eye level, dispensing a lengthy list of hazards one would be exposed to from this point on. Red and white danger signs were posted every ten feet on either side. 24 font "No Trespassing" signs marched along at every five. Warnings of every type from every agency linked the spaces in between.

It was Annie's duty as a citizen to adhere to them but it was also her responsibility as a policeman to make sure others did the same and that there was no one of interest squatting inside. A few minutes investigated the property wouldn't hurt. Annie touched the padlock holding the chains together and a small shock bounced her hand away. She yelped and rubbed the offended fingers, scanning the danger signs again. Not one of them warned of an electric fence.

Reynold's was on the verge of a natural energy breakthrough when the catastrophe happened. It was possible that the converter survived the explosion and was still harvesting energy with every lightning strike. Annie wasn't an electrical engineer but she did have enough sense to pick up a stick and poke around the fence. With no further spark or sizzle, she deemed the shock an instance of static discharge and shimmed through the gap between the two gates. Being small had its perks.

Trash and abandoned materials littered the ground around the property. Debris from the original explosion peppered the yard with crumpled bits of metal and twisted machinery. Bent screws, chipped bolts, and broken washers were all that remained of the central core. Hollowed out shells of smaller buildings off to the side marked the graves of many a lost investment but most of the main facility had remained intact. Annie walked the perimeter, checking for any signs of entry or lodgings hospitable to the desperate. Glass crunched underneath her boots where the windows had blown out in the original concussion.

Around the side, next to the loading dock, one of the large service doors was left open. Whether it was opened before or after the accident, she couldn't tell, but its empty face was utterly black and unrestricted. More abyss than portal, it was big enough to swallow a tractor trailer whole. Annie cautiously crept up along the side and peeked around the frame.

"Hello?" she called. Her voice echoed into the cavern and vanished. Annie pulled out her flashlight and shined it inside with a hard swallow. The darkness deteriorated the beam into a dim gray glow.

"Is anybody in there?" she called again.

Something suddenly crossed the beam, causing Annie to flinch. She recovered quickly and shined the torch from side to side but there was nothing left to catch. Whatever it was had disappeared in an instant. There was only darkness and the sound of rain as it tapped against her plastic poncho. Annie positioned herself in the center of the large open doorframe for a better look and slowly reached her hand into the darkness. The energy in the building was tangible. Her body practically hummed with it, stirring a queasy feeling in her gut. Something didn't feel right. Annie slowly stepped away from the door and something told her not to turn her back to it. She carefully reached for the radio pinned to her shoulder.

"284 to 14."

Crackling static answered the call. Annie continued her retreat. Every step took her a little farther from the door, but the intensity of the darkness only grew. "284 to 14," she tried again. A distorted frequency broke the static with a blip. There was too much interference from the lightning, maybe even the plant itself, to connect. She was on her own.

But she wasn't alone.

Annie suddenly back stepped into a muddied hole and fell to the concrete with a splash. She yipped faster than the puppy pokemon tucked on her belt and broke eye contact with the door. By the time she wiped the mud from her eyes and looked up again, the uneasy feeling was gone and nothing came out of the shadows after her. The door was just a door. Thoroughly embarrassed, Annie got up, fixed her poncho, and put away her flashlight. It was a good thing there weren't any witnesses because her fellow officers would've never let her live it down. She would forever be known as the biggest baby on the force. No adult in their right mind was afraid of the dark. Determined to act her age, Annie brushed herself off, moved on from the door, and investigated the rest of the property.

Going inside without a partner was against policy anyway.

There wasn't much to see from the outside aside from the occasional architectural carnage and there was only so much scrap Annie could safely navigate between bushels of weeds before it all started to look the same. The power plant proved to be a bust until a small break in the fence alluded to an unofficial means of access and egress from the plant. Stacks of rotting pallets kept it well disguised. Small scratches on the ground at the bottom indicated someone was repeatedly pushing through the fence, and recently to boot. The surrounding vegetation was flat but still green.

On the other side of the fence, cinderblocks, trash and abandoned equipment created a makeshift pathway off of the property and into the city. It was the closest thing to a game trail Annie would find. She navigated the passage slowly and still managed to rip her poncho in several places. She couldn't imagine a person bigger than herself slinking through unscathed. The tunnel opened up into an alley that eventually expanded into a street. That street then branched off into several roundabout dead ends. One of which was very much alive.

And unhappy.

Just beyond an old clothes line, behind a stack of crates, situated under the bottom of a fire escape, was a cottage, as much as a cottage could be when it was made of tarp and strung up by electrical wire. The roof was patchy, walls removable, and the front door little more than a fourth of a bed curtain. The corner of the surrounding buildings created most of the foundation and one had to bend over to get inside. There was just enough room underneath the tarp to protect a refrigerator box.

The cardboard accommodations must have been quite impressive because there were three occupants vying for the space and one of them just happened to be the man in black from yesterday. Still sporting the same baseball hat, over coat, and grumpy disposition, he shook the box from the outside. A minun and plusle were huddled together inside and only hugged one another tighter during the episode. Mr. Black growled and ventured into the box, roaring and chasing the creatures around until they squeaked in retreat and scurried out of the box. Mr. Black reemerged, scowl as taunt as ever, and shook a fist at the two cheering pokemon when they paused to look back.

Annie couldn't make out what he shouted afterwards but she was pretty sure it wasn't nice. He spoke a mix of words that reminded her of an angry foreigner switching between languages with the flux of his temper, except the second language he spoke sounded more pokemon than human. It was unlike anything she had ever heard before. Annie would be the first to admit that she meowed at feline pokemon and playfully growled at her poochyena during tug-o-war but this level of vocal manipulation was beyond simple imitation. Sure, Mr. Black wasn't exactly firing on all cylinders. Annie realized that much after his outburst yesterday when she first caught a glimpse of his colorful vocabulary, but these sounds were composed of a complex articulation using fluctuations and patterns similar to a human language. Not some jumbled mess of nonsense.

"Cool," she whispered.

Mr. Black looked up, spotted Annie, and froze, understanding that he had been caught in yet another private moment. Annie stiffened. She was so fascinated with the exchange between him and the pokemon that she forgot to announce herself again. At this rate, she was likely to catch him with his pants down. The two stared at one another until the shock wore off and Mr. Black's frown dropped to the same low slant as his eyes.

"Am I under arrest?" he barked, cutting straight through formalities. This time, Annie was ready for him.

"Depends," she answered, growing taller and bolder by the second. "I'd like to ask you a few questions about the crime scene you were at yesterday."

"I'm not talking to you," Mr. Black recited. Annie choked on her pride a little. She had practiced that one in the mirror last night.

"Then, I'll have to take you down to the station for questioning," she informed.

Mr. Black raised an eyebrow. They both knew that was never going to happen. She had neither the authority nor the circumstances to do so. Whatever Annie said next had to be sharp enough to raze through his skepticism or this conversation would end even faster than the last one.

"I know about the midtown boys," she explained.

Mr. Black paused, twisted his lips in a snarl, and scoffed so hard that he cut open his busted lip. Minun and Plusle capitalized on his distraction and rushed under his coattails, back into the cardboard box. Mr. Black lost focus, cursed and chased them out again. This time, they ran towards the clothes line and dashed under the nearest safe haven which happened to be the officer's poncho. Annie lifted in surprise as the two pokemon climbed up on her boots to dry their feet. Mr. Black narrowed his eyes, thought hard between the three, and finally settled on the biggest baby of them all.

"I didn't kill anybody," he quickly declared.

"Of course not," Annie blurted right back, surprising herself as much as Mr. Black with the bluntness of her reply. She sould have withheld that knowledge to try and facilitate more information out of him, but it was obvious to her that Mr. Black was innocent. The physical requirements needed to subdue three young men alone ruled him out. It's possible he had a pokemon partner to aid him in the crime, but the only pokemon pals she knew of were the two using the steel in her boots to regulate their discharge.

"I mean," Annie quickly rephrased. "You might have been the last one to see them alive."

Mr. Black jabbed a finger at the bruise swelling his already heavy eye. "If you hadn't noticed, I can't see much for shit," he snapped.

"Still, you might-,"

"I don't."

"But-,"

"Scram!" Mr. Black turned his back on all three of his uninvited guests and used his hunched shoulders to throw up a shield of impregnable distrust. Annie could never hope to break it in this lifetime, but she could try to find a way around it.

"Now, wait just a minute." Annie looked down at her feet and judged the length of her steps against her poncho to make sure her passengers remained dry while she shuffled closer. "I'm not finished yet!"

"Look kid," Mr. Black began, turning around just in time to watch Annie lose her balance while avoiding a puddle. She grabbed the shaft holding up his tent and it shock a squeak right out of her. Annie quickly cleared her throat and waved the pain away from her fingers.

"I can't make you talk to me," she tried again.

"Damn right."

"But don't you want to know what happened?"

"Dead is dead. Don't matter who it is."

Mr. Black swayed off towards a bin of unsorted recyclables that he had collected earlier in the week. Annie hurried after him, smoothing out her walk to meet him on the other side of the container.

"That's a pretty simple answer given your history," she pressed.

"I'm a pretty simple guy. Now, go away."

Mr. Black rummaged through the bin and found some aluminum. He could get half a cooper if he found enough cans and turned them into the recycling station. It was pretty clear he wasn't going to talk so Annie watched his technique and started digging in the bin along with him. She touched something metallic and it shocked her, sparking another squeak. Mr. Black slapped his hands on the edge of the bin.

"Why are you still here?" he demanded.

It was a valid question. How did one end up sorting through garbage next to a stranger on the wrong side of town in the shadow of disaster with two cheering pokemon strapped to one's feet? Annie looked down into the plastics.

"Two people work faster than one," she shrugged.

Annie also placed her hands on the edge of the bin and touched the metal lining running around the inside. This time, the discharge zapped both of them. Mr. Black sharply cursed and walked away. Annie jogged up beside him to apologize, and this time, she didn't even need a conductor to connect them. A spark jumped between their shoulders. Mr. Black flinched, sucked back a few words Annie was glad she couldn't understand and snatched up her poncho, revealing the two giggling pokemon underneath. He took one in each hand, limped over to his box, and shoved them inside. Annie glanced down at her boots and rocked on her heels with an "Oh!"

Every step she took with the oppositely charged pokemon on her feet created a natural alternating current between them. Her wet clothes and steel boots carried the current and caused her to discharge the built up electricity every time she came in contact with another conductor. The mystery was solved. Mr. Black should become a detective.

"Thank you!" Annie chirped, freely kicking out her legs in a show of soggy freedom.

Mr. Black started growling again and continued his march away from the tent. He made it all the way to the clothes line before Annie realized he wasn't coming back.

"Hey wait!" she called, trotting after him and following a step or two behind just in case she still held a charge. "Where are you going?"

"If you're going to follow me then I'm taking you back where you belong," he said.

"You know how to get to the station from here? That's wonderful!" Annie sang. She suddenly bounced into Mr. Black's back, causing them both to stumble a few paces. He whirled around with a flare of his overcoat.

"You're lost?!" he shouted.

Annie tapped her fingertips together. "Not exactly," she mumbled. "I could probably find my way back if I retraced my steps but I took a pretty roundabout way of getting here and my poochyena can't track smells in the rain."

"Don't you have a GPS or something?"

"My phone battery died when I went into the power plant."

"You went into the power plant?"

"I was looking for you."

"Are you insane?!"

Given the nature of the person asking, she might want to consider it.

Mr. Black twirled away and started pacing. "No," he firmly declared a few turns in. "Absolutely not!"

Annie glanced around the alley for another person. There was none. Minun and Plusle watched the exchange from the opening of the box.

"Fine!" Mr. Black suddenly relented, grinding the words between his teeth. "But only until 5th avenue!"

The two cheering pokemon giggled behind the flap. Mr. Black marched on without another word. Annie wasn't quite sure who he was talking to but whoever they were, they were clearly in her favor so she wasn't going to waste the argument. She hopped back into pace and kept a respectful distance in case his temper sparked again.

Mr. Black didn't need another voice in his head so Annie resolved herself to walk quietly behind him until they reached 5th Avenue where she could make the rest of her way home by herself. The rain settled nicely over the silence, allowing a rare opportunity to watch Mr. Black without any hissing or spitting between them. Everything about him was heavy: the way he walked, the slope of his shoulders, even the color of his jacket, especially in the rain, but none of it seemed to bother him. It was as if he had carried the weight his entire life.

Annie lifted her hands and examined them as she walked, pondering what they might have looked like had she grown up carrying the same burdens as Mr. Black. Not that she knew his circumstances or anything. Still, such personal molding reminded her of pokemon and all of the different ways nature had selected them. Perhaps she and Mr. Black shared a common ancestor somewhere along the line. And if they did, how far back would she have to go to find the deviation between dissident and loyalist?

Up ahead, Mr. Black suddenly scratched at his ear using his hand as if it was his foot. Did humans get fleas? Annie supposed it was possible when one lived in a box. Mr. Black then wiggled a finger in his ear. The itch must have been profound because he went so far as to lean into his shoulder to satisfy it. Maybe he had an inner ear problem related to his peculiar mental state?

Or maybe it was something worse.

Mr. Black unexpectedly stopped in the middle of the street. He didn't move for several seconds, and when he did, he started pacing again.

"What is it?" Annie asked.

Mr. Black motioned with his hands, arguing with himself about something of the utmost importance. He nervously bit at his knuckles then clapped his hands over his ears and sobbed. Anybody in their right mind would have fled for higher ground, which is probably why Annie dashed out in front of Mr. Black to help him. Crazy or not, he was in pain, and it was her job to help those in need. She crouched down in front of him so that she fell in line with his downturned gaze. It was a seriously disadvantageous position but they had already established that she was insane so what did it matter? That common thread between them might actually help her understand what was going on.

"I'm here," Annie firmly declared, finally establishing her presence for the first time since they met. "Talk to me." If Mr. Black heard voices in his head, he might as well let them speak. It was the only way to isolate them and it was the only therapeutic tactic she knew to help with this sort of thing.

Mr. Black winced open an eye, following the sound of her voice instead of looking at her face. "It's so loud," he cringed, unable to maintain his defenses under such pain. "They keep screaming, over and over and over."

Annie quickly reached up and touched his elbow, giving him something to tether the voices to. "Talk to me," she repeated.

A look of shock passed over Mr. Black's face. People like him weren't often given such unbiased opportunity, but something pulled his expression tight again, causing him to wince even harder than before. Annie pulled her hand away, afraid that it was her touch that caused it. Mr. Black opened his eyes again. His pupils were shrunken and flattened, pressed by stress into a slit like shape. He whispered something Annie couldn't make out.

"What?" she asked, searching his face for some sort of clue. "What is it?"

"Run," he said again, this time in the common tongue. Annie instinctually snorted. Like she would leave him in such a state. Mr. Black suddenly snatched her up by the lower shoulders, just like he did to Minun and Plusle when they were under her poncho, and shook the humor right out of her.

"Run or I'll kill you!" he warned.

Annie underestimated how strong he was. Mr. Black stared at her again, this time with a new fixated intensity.

"Run," he purred before a smile twitched into the corner of his mouth. "Run so I can catch you."

Annie yanked herself free. This wasn't the Mr. Black she knew. He was too brutally honest and weary for such devious and playful machinations. This voice belonged to someone else. She couldn't explain it but she knew it was true and it terrified her. Annie did exactly what she was told to. She ran . . . straight at Mr. Black and punched him in the face.

"You can't scare me away like your pokemon friends!" she yelled at him. If Mr. Black truly wanted to hurt her, he wouldn't have tried to warn her, but that didn't stop her voice from cracking either.

Frozen by the blow, Mr. Black looked off to the side before he finally thawed and touched the tender spot on his chin. The rain tapped against his back, quieting the rest of the sounds around him. He glanced over at the tiny fists clenched at the officer's sides. One of her knuckles was bleeding, cut by the rough hairs along his jaw. It was little more than a drop all together, but the streets were always ravenous for blood, and tonight, they were on the prowl.

A throaty snarl rippled down the alley, shaking the rain as it fell from the sky. Mr. Black whirled around and saw a Persian stalking towards them not 35 feet away. Unlike most classy cats, it was oil black from tail to nose and the jewel on its head was purple instead of red. It glowed like a demonic third eye, watching their every move. Two four inch fangs emerged from beneath its dark satin lips in the wake of another snarl. A lifetime of cracking, crunching, and crushing bone kept them clean and polished. 110 lbs. of pure killing perfection stalked a little closer. The skulls of the cat's past victims practically popped underneath its heavy paws with each perfectly silent well-placed step.

Annie had never seen a demon rise from the tar pits of hell before but there was always a first time for everything. Mr. Black was a little more versed in the subject. He fled behind Annie and hid in the curve of her back. She wasn't sure what good it would do given his shoulders were twice as wide as hers. He then pushed her forward.

"What are you doing?" she hissed.

"Protect and serve. That's what you people do, isn't it?" Mr. Black justified as he shoved her forward again.

Annie tripped, slipped, and face planted into the street, scraping her chin and hands against the ground. A black shadow sailed over her, raking the height of her clumsiness instead of her head and flicking off her hat. Mr. Black dove to the side to avoid the pounce and landed heavily across the sidewalk. He crawled up onto the cement and threw his back against the wall but Persian closed the distance between them with one bite. It snatched Mr. Black by the foot and dragged him into the street.

Annie was back on her feet when she heard the screams. Mr. Black frantically kicked with his bad knee but the cat only winked as if the hit was the bothersome touch of a beautifly. Annie matched his screams and charged. Up above, lightning struck the power plant again. The thunderclap matched the strike of Annie's baton almost perfectly, adding the needed light and sound to turn the hit into a fully loaded manmade electrical attack.

Special contact sensors in the wand trigged the baton's electric capabilities. Blue sparks spat out from it in every direction. Enhanced by the rainy conditions, they raced across Persian with an untamed fury, exploding outward in a fantastic web of plasmic energy. The baton sparked out of Annie's hand and clattered to the ground, shocking them all through the puddles until an internal fuse blew and the jolt ended in a puff of acrid smoke.

The baton released its hold and dropped the three like marionettes cut from their strings. A few seconds later, Mr. Black shot up from the ground so fast that his knees bent upward and his heels popped off of the ground to counterbalance him. Steam drifted off of his shoulders. He looked around, expecting a four clawed scythe to cleave his head off at any second, but the whiskered reaper had already melted into the rain.

Gone as quickly as it came.

An attack of that magnitude wasn't enough to deal any real damage to an ice age monster like that, but even monsters could be taken by surprise. The manmade lightning strike, combined with a real one, probably scared the cat back into whatever crevice it had climbed out of. Either that, or the cat had caught a glimpse of his life when it flashed before his eyes and that horror show was enough to frighten off even the devil. But if the streets taught Mr. Black one thing, it was that they were never safe. Persian would be back to finish what it started and he didn't plan on sticking around when it did.

A little ways away in the street, Annie played on her hands and knees, trying to figure out where her arms began and where her legs ended. It was the first time she was ever electroshocked and her body wasn't used to the crackling kiss of 120 voltz. Disoriented and a little queasy, she waved outward to catch the air and make it help her stand. Surprisingly enough, she caught a person trying to slip past her instead.

"Did we win?" she asked while groping up Mr. Black's sleeve.

"What the hell are you talking about?" he shouted. "You almost got me killed!"

Mr. Black shrugged her off and Annie fell to the ground. She decided to stay there until her body stopped humming. The sound of Mr. Black's footsteps grew farther and farther away behind her. They were becoming quite familiar by now.

Splash. Pause. Splash.

Annie couldn't follow him even if she wanted too, but that didn't matter. The only thing that mattered was that Mr. Black was back to normal, slinging profanities unfit for a virgin's ears at the same beat as his footsteps. Annie's hands began throbbing even worse than her legs so she looked down at them for an explanation. Blood pooled in her palms where she had scraped them against the cement. The last time she skinned them this bad was when she was eight and fell trying to jump the curb on her rollerblades. It begged an important question:

How did she go from rollerblading down the sidewalk on Saturday afternoons to working a beat that did its best to try and break her around every corner?

Annie looked down at the blue and white checkered police cap that had fallen from her head. She picked it up, shook out the excess water, and strapped it around her chin again.

Because for her, those two streets were one in the same.


	5. Chapter 5

**Chapter 5**

Zach stared at his feet, utterly perplexed that he had two when he should have had only one. To his surprise, gray cotton socks poked through the holes in his shoes instead of mangled shreds of flesh. The black devil cat had him in its grasp. It could have bitten off his foot at the ankle, leaving a stub of sinew and bone to hobble upon instead of a bum knee.

But it didn't.

And Zach couldn't figure out why. He looked to his right for an answer, but that only proposed an even greater enigma. Baby sat on the back of the ambulance beside him and played with the bandage on her chin. She looked absolutely ridiculous with it on, especially when she swung her legs back and forth and they didn't even touch the ground.

"Stop picking at it," Zach demanded.

Not that he cared if the wound left a scar or not. The paramedics wouldn't let him leave until they finished tending to Baby, and if she kept messing with the bandage like she had done the past twenty minutes, they'd be on the curb the rest of the night. If he was going to spend the night in the gutter, he preferred sleeping in one he was familiar with. Baby promptly shoved her hands in her lap, but they too were bandaged and it wasn't long before she started playing with them instead. Zach snatched up her wrists, tightened the bandages so she couldn't get at them again, and threw her hands down with a grumble.

He should have left her in that alley. He should have never stopped to look back, but he did, and the sight of her pathetic little frame drenched in the rain twisted his gut in ways expired dairy never could. The next thing Zach knew, he was jumping out in front of a police cruiser, screaming and hollering about the "skinny little idiot" they left behind. And apparently, they knew exactly who he was talking about and had been looking for her for quite some time. Zach had thought that would be the end of it but with his obviously violent injuries, the boys in blue weren't willing to let him walk away so easily. And of course, that's when Baby finally found her bearings and hobbled into view looking like a damned ghoul with a pint of blood running down her neck and hands.

The boys really made a hood ornament out of him then. Zach still felt the sting of the cold wet metal where the boys slammed him against the cruiser and slapped a set of handcuffs around his wrists. The bastards ripped his collar when they yanked him up again. Baby pleaded his innocence and her brothers weren't convinced, but her persistence ended in a comprise that left Zach in her custody.

He would have preferred jail.

Zach turned up his wrists to look at the tightened silver bracelets, compliments of the City's finest. He wouldn't be in this mess if he would've just done what he was supposed to do and spit in Baby's face when she first approached him like her and her kind deserved. It was all her fault. He wouldn't have crossed Persian's path otherwise. Out of all the neighborhoods Baby could have wandered into, why did it have to be his?

"How's your leg?" Baby asked as she leaned over the side of his lap for a better look.

Zach turned his back to her and she craned her neck over his shoulder, the god damn menace. Just because they shared a near death experience didn't mean that they were friends. It only meant that it was Tuesday.

"Cofield!"

Baby flinched as a man with a shiny badge and stripes on his shoulders marched up to the ambulance where they sat. She quickly returned to her seat and shoved her hands in her lap again. "You better have a damn good excuse for all of this!"

And she did, but it was unbelievable. What she spouted was the cut rate plot of a B rate horror movie that never made it out to theaters. Devil cats didn't exist, especially not in Midtown. The tightwad with the shiny badge wasn't impressed by the tall tale and lit into Baby hot enough to make her sizzle in the rain. She winced with every word, clenching deeper and deeper into her guilt until her head sunk below her shoulders. Zach found the whole exchange amusing until Baby called on him as a witness. Officer Shiny Badges was still red in the face from shouting when he turned to him.

"Well?" Shiny Badges demanded. "Anything you'd like to add?"

Zach had a few colorful phrases of his own to share, but he kept them to himself. Picking a fight with a prickled policeman was a bad idea on a good day and Badges was already miffed. Zach wasn't about to catch that sharpedo with his bare hands, especially when it broke the waters with such a pompous attitude. It wasn't Zach's fault that policemen were so incompetent. He was the real victim here which meant he didn't have to put up with this shit.

Badges could shove it.

Zach stood up and relished in the fact that several hands went to several belts because of it. Being a whole head shorter than Badges, Zach thrust himself underneath the policeman's chin.

"I didn't see a god damn thing," he spat with words as thick as molasses. "Especially after your officer nearly electrocuted me while chasing an alley cat." Badges didn't like that last part. He threw Baby a mean look so strong that she flinched again. Zach thrust up his wrists like a shank to the throat. "So am I free to go or will my one phone call from the station be to Channel 6 News?"

The implications of the threat boiled the blood in Badges' veins and it steamed out of his ears. News crews were already buzzing around the outskirts of the patrol cars. One shout from a disgruntled citizen and they'd swarm faster than a beedrill's nest. With great loathing and resentment, Badges produced the handcuff key. He had no evidence, no probable cause, and no more patience.

Zach didn't blink, not even after the cuffs were off and he stormed away from the ambulance. He outlasted every single stare and gawk as he wobbled by. The only thing in his sight was the gap in the police line behind the second ambulance. It was just big enough for a man to squeeze through and the darkness beyond was so thick that even this nightmare of red and blue lights couldn't break through it. The shadows enveloped him almost instantly as he passed through. Nobody could find him now.

"Wait!"

It was Baby. She was like a bad penny that kept showing up at the most inopportune times, offering handfuls of bad luck for whoever picked her up. Zach stopped only because he knew she would keep following him otherwise. She was like a dog. A mutt. Zach ground his molars down another millimeter and spun around to cut her off before she zapped him again this night.

"Keep the hell away from me," he roared.

Baby splashed to a stop a few feet away, winded from the one hundred yard dash she used to catch up to him. One day she might just do the world some good and collapse, never to get up again. Baby winked up from beneath the lip of her checkered hat. "Why didn't you say anything?" she asked, completely ignoring his earlier outburst.

Zach wanted to throttle her but he couldn't move, not when he still had two legs to stand on and it was all her fault.

"Nobody believes you," Zach growled. "Why would they believe me?"

Hell, Zach wasn't sure he believed it himself. The voices in his head had grown so riotous when it all happened that he couldn't remember what was actually said and done. Great big black spots in his memory forced his mind to jumble what he did remember into a cesspool of confusing sensations. It made him sick just thinking about it. Not that the police would do anything about a superstitious devil cat anyway. Feral pokemon thrived throughout all the slums in the city, killing, steal, and attacking people, pokemon, and property for a living. Trainers abandoned their pokemon every day with little too no reason and nothing was ever done about it.

This one's too big. This one's too weak. This one can't attack with this TM. It doesn't listen to me. Its fur doesn't match my carpets. The excuses were endless but the end result was the same: another pokemon set free to starve in the sewers of Midtown. Unable to return to their wild instincts and too desperate to follow the rules of proper domestication, most of these pokemon had no choice but to turn savage.

Those that were trained to fight usually became the most aggressive. They knew how to battle and it made them bold. Most pokemon related attacks were because of ferals and usually ended in severe injury, mutilation, or death. They knew to attack the hands and waists of trainers before they could use an item or release a pokemon, effectively debilitating them before they even had a chance to defend themselves. Eventually, trainers and average people became indistinguishable and the attacks escalated. Some released pokemon survived and found a civilian compassionate enough to take them in or a trainer weak enough to add them to their party.

More often than not, these pokemon died where they were dumped, unable to make decisions or find resources, climates, or parties to support them. The weak ones were killed off early by more seasoned orphans or by trainers looking to hone their skills with an easy match. Zach stepped over many a fly ridden carcass in his day. Devil cats like Persian merely quickened the natural selection process. It wasn't unheard of for a feral pokemon to become strong enough to evolve on its own. They gained more experience fighting for their lives every day in the street than tournament trained battles, but malnourishment and starvation usually stunted any real growth.

If Persian really was a Persian birthed by the cruel upbringing of the city's underworld, then Zach almost didn't want it to be caught. Deadly as the devil was, it was still the product of the streets, much like himself, only more refined and efficient in the art of survival. Perfect in every malignant way. A force capable and willing to take on those who thought themselves above the limits of natural law. People like Baby who lived in a fantasy world overflowing with sunshine and sugar candies.

"Why would you lie like that?" she asked, honestly confused as to his behavior.

"Because," he explained as simply as her little pinhead could understand. "You're the police."

And that was that. Disappointment flashed in Baby's eyes. Maybe now she'd stop following him around like a damn poochyena. Zach turned away and waited for her to call out to him again but she didn't. He walked on into the night and she didn't follow. Finally, he could be alone. Zach wiggled a finger in his ear.

As much as he could be anyway.


	6. Chapter 6

**Chapter 6**

Zach was going to kill himself. Find a bit of dirty brown broken glass and stab himself right in the jugular. If he was lucky, he'd bleed out faster than the time it took Baby to find him again, but he wasn't. He never was.

Baby stood at the clothesline with an umbrella propped up against her shoulder. Her civilian clothes were remarkably plain and consisted of a cotton blouse, wrinkled jeans, and a set of lotad plastered rubber rain boots that clashed with the colors of her umbrella. She wore her hair back in a pin straight ponytail that was almost as tight as the line between her lips.

Zach squared off against her on the other side of the line, fists clenched at his sides and shoulders bowed. A light drizzle tempered the tension between them. It drummed against Zach's overcoat almost as loudly as Baby's umbrella. "I thought I told you never to bother me again," he barked.

Baby pinched her toes inward and adjusted her umbrella with both hands to keep it from rolling into her bandaged chin. "I'm not here for you," she squeaked, almost as loudly as her boots.

Zach glanced over his left shoulder. Then, his right. "I'm the only one here!" he shouted, emphasizing the point with an echo.

Baby's eyelids suddenly dropped to suspiciously smug levels as if she had been waiting, and hoping, for such a response. Behind him, Minun and Plusle stuck their heads out of the cardboard box, one on top of another. They spotted Baby and cheered, rushing out to meet her despite the rain. Zach glanced down as they raced between his legs, shocked that they should pass so close to him without a single shred of reservation or hesitation. Baby crouched down to meet the two pokemon and respectfully kept her hands on her knees. Most irresponsible trouble making pokemon feeders tried to touch stray pokemon in the hopes of making a connection. A trip to the nearest hospital or clinic usually followed. But Baby knew better, and somehow, that made it worse.

Zach quickly snapped his head away. It wasn't like he was jealous of the attention they gave her or anything. So what if Baby wasn't completely incompetent? That didn't mean she was streetwise. Not in the slightest. But it did mean she dealt with strays in the past. This borderline stalker attraction to him had a uniform distribution to every abandoned reject in the city. Good. He was starting to think he was special.

Zach turned a shoulder towards them, hoping it would block them from his view. Whatever Baby did with those wretched vermin was no business of his. Maybe she'd even whisk them away and he'd never have to deal with their snoring ever again. Finally, he might get some peace and quiet. Zach cautiously peeked over his shoulder at the trio.

Baby reached inside her satchel and produced a bag of poke-treats. Deprived as Minun and Plusle were, they still recognized the sweet crinkling of a plastic bag as a means to an edible end. Baby tore off the seal and the aroma almost put the two pokemon in a faint. She set two individual treat cubes on the ground. They were perfectly placed between the pokemon to prevent any confusion as to which confection belonged to whom. Minun and Plusle stepped forward in unison, took their treat with both hands, and happily gorged themselves until sparks popped from their cheeks. Baby watched with so much delight that she didn't even realize Zach was upon her until his boots came toe to toe with her own. She jumped up in surprise and he snatched the bag of treats from her hand.

"Don't feed them that garbage," he snarled. "It'll make'm sick."

"I checked the ingredients," Baby defended. "These are specially made for electric types."

"As much as a fat greasy burger is for a diabetic."

Baby's smile was comically wide for her small face, especially when she suddenly stuck her neck out farther than a doduo and pointed her chin at him. "So you're the type that likes to baby their pokemon?" she mused.

Zach puffed up faster than a qwilfish. "I don't give two shits about those vermin!" he spat.

"Then, you won't mind if I give them another treat," Baby replied as she picked the bag out of his hands with an expert flick of her wrist.

That bitch.

"I'll do whatever the hell I want," Zach snapped right back. He swiped the bag from Baby's hands, flinging several compact cubes across the alley in the process. Baby puffed out her lips to match the size of his chest and snatched the bag back into her possession. Zach reached for the treats again, but Baby jerked them out of reach. He tried a second time and she slapped his hand away. It might as well have slapped all of the hair off of his face.

"You can't hit me like that!" Zach shouted.

"I can do whatever I want," Baby quoted before she promptly turned her back on him. She had some nerve talking to him like that. This was his house, his territory, his pesky vermin!

"Who do you think you are?" Zach demanded.

Baby grinned and spun around so fast that her umbrella twirled in place on her shoulder. She thrust out her hand. "Annie Cofield," she proudly declared. "And you?"

"If I tell you, will you leave and never come back?"

"I promise."

The end was finally in sight.

"My name is Jingles," Zach flatly lied.

"That's not your real name."

"It's a nickname."

"It's a cat's name."

"A little pussy never hurt anybody."

Baby blushed and quickly pulled back her hand.

Zach laughed harder than he intended to. "At least, not for most of us," he continued.

Baby lost her grin then. She lightly touched the rain dampened bandages wrapped around the back of her hand and looked down at Zach's leg. When she saw two feet instead of one, she picked up her chin once more. Only idiots smiled like that. The only reason they walked away from yesterday's attack with little more than a few scratches was because the devil cat wanted them too. Fancy electrical weapons, formal training, and luck didn't have anything to do with it. Persian merely made the mistake of playing with her food before eating it. Even a bumble headed idiot like Baby understood that.

"It's not safe to be out here by yourself," she began.

"I could've told you that," Zach scoffed. That was one thing they had in common. So why wasn't she practicing what she preached?

Zach suddenly noticed the bulge on Baby's hip. Her shirt bunched up over it, exposing the bottom of a badge and a holster. An officer of the law like her was never off duty. "You didn't come here just to check up on me," Zach suddenly realized. "You're looking for her."

"Her?"

"Do you have some kind of death wish?"

Baby quickly snapped her free hand down to her side like she would at attention at the academy. When her small little fingers clenched into a fist, it only made her wrists that much thinner. "I have an obligation to protect the people of this city," she firmly replied. "And if that Persian isn't found, more people are going to get hurt."

"The only one who is going to get hurt is you," Zach snorted. "Try thinking about yourself once in a while."

"It's my job not too."

"And so far, you've done a pretty piss poor job of it." Maybe she'd finally break that hero complex if he kicked the soap box out from underneath her. "Every time you show up, shit happens. It's only a matter of time until you drown in it."

Baby watched the rain drip off of the edge of her umbrella.

"This isn't some scrawny party filler pokemon we're talking about," Zach continued. "That cat's a tournament trained killer." He jabbed a finger at Baby's chest where her badge normally was. "One bite and she'll punch through that dinky little shield faster than a sheet of tin foil."

"It . . . she, is still out there and I'm the only one willing to do something about it. I have to find her before she hurts anybody else," Baby answered.

"You don't find a pokemon like that. They find you."

"And what, kill me?" Baby proposed, almost as easily as Zach would.

Zach leaned in closer to her, right up underneath her umbrella so that he could look her dead in the eye when he told her the truth. "And eat you," he whispered. "Keep you alive just enough to keep the blood pumping over your organs when they spill out of your gut. A little extra gravy to help them slip down their gullet."

Zach swayed in closer and came chest to chest with her. His big black overcoat cast a shadow over her, darkening his own features as he spoke. "They stay warmer that way," he explained. "If you cut them open without causing them to bleed out, you can still feel their heartbeat. One beat. Two beats. Getting slower and slower. It's enough to lull you to sleep."

Baby leaned back as Zach pressed forward. "And the little gasp they make when you finally bite into that soft tender flesh . . ." Zach closed his eyes and smiled. "It's ecstasy."

Two rattata climbing over the garbage cans a block away scattered when they heard the slap.

"I wasn't talking to you," Baby yelled while clenching and unclenching the handle of her umbrella. She meant to come up to bat with it next if she needed to.

No longer feeling quite so hungry, Zach rubbed the tender spot growing along his jaw. "For muck's sake woman! What the hell is wrong with you?" he winced.

Baby fluttered out of her outburst and quickly stuck out her umbrella between them to share its coverage. "I'm sorry," she said, "but it worked last time too . . ."

Last time? What the hell was she talking about? And what did she mean when she said: 'not talking to you?' Zach looked over his left shoulder. Then, his right, and there was still nobody there. It was just Baby and him. They shared an umbrella, and to make matters worse, Baby's presence wasn't suffocating in the slightest. In fact, standing underneath her umbrella was quieter than standing in the rain. Zach quickly back stepped out of her reach. The rain ran cold down the back of his neck, jolting him with a shiver of paranoia.

"I don't need your protection," he firmly declared, bowing up again.

Every day was a fight for his life. He didn't need an off duty rookie cop mucking up his winning streak just because they felt obligated to interfere. The devil cat persian was just another means to the same dismal end, one that ended sooner rather than later for his kind. Baby could play cops and robbers somewhere else. Down below, Minun and Plusle bounced electricity off of her double insulated rubber boots. Zach grabbed them up before she could pollute them with her fancy shallow virtues.

"We don't need your protection," he said again. Minun and Plusle sparked underneath his grip. Electricity snaked up Zach's arms, over his shoulders, and down into his tailcoat. He released the two pokemon with a curse and they ran off towards the refrigerator box. Zach shook the burns from his hands and looked back at Baby.

"You're like a magneton of chaos!" he shouted. "My life was already perfectly miserable without you in it."

Baby apologetically held out the bag of treats.

"And stop that smiling," Zach demanded as he snatched the treats from her hands. "It's getting on my nerves."

Baby firmly smashed her lips together, but the chuckle that built up behind them broke through with a snort.

"What now?" Zach groaned, utterly exhausted by her endless good humor.

"It's nothing," Baby said, waving her hand in front of her face. "It's just . . ."

"Just what?!"

"It's just . . . you won't stop talking to me . . ."

Zach paused, contemplated the thought, and stiffened with the soul sucking realization that Baby was right. He clenched his teeth as hard as his fists, spun Baby around by the shoulders, and pushed her out of the alley without another word.

This time, somebody else could help Baby find her way home.


	7. Chapter 7

**Chapter 7**

"_Are we friends_?"

Zach could've easily answered the question with a lie, but he had no problem telling the truth. "I don't have any friends," he answered.

"_But what about that woman_?" the voice asked.

If by woman, she meant Baby, than he had nothing else to say. Baby was obnoxious, clueless, reckless, impatient, stubborn, simple, naïve, innocent, kind . . . "She's nothing," Zach said. "Absolutely nothing."

"_Like you_?"

This truth was a little harder to admit. Zach's voice dropped down to a whisper. "Like me," he confessed.

The voice in the darkness contemplated this deeply before continuing. "_I can make you something_," it said.

The devil made a promise like that once.

"_I can be your friend_."

Zach wasn't sure he wanted any, but it felt good to talk to somebody, to talk to one voice in his head instead of so many. It was quieter this way, almost eerily so, and suddenly, Zach wasn't so sure he liked it. "I don't want any friends," he answered.

"_I can take care of you_," the voice explained.

"I can take care of myself." That was something Zach became proficient in ever since he dropped out of high school, but the voice wasn't listening. It had already made its decision in its own head, which scared Zach speechless because they were supposed to be in his.

"_I choose you_," the voice declared like some sort of master to its pokemon.

Zach tried to recoil from the voice, but there was nowhere for him to go. There was no one else to call out to.

"_We will be friends_," the voice determined, obsessed with its own decisions. It reached out to Zach, intruding deeper into his mind where the broken bits and pieces like to hide. "_I will love you_," it said,_ "and together we will be something."_

Zach couldn't run. Not from himself. He couldn't escape, not when the voice came from within.

The voice rubbed against his neck, growing fangs and a smile. "_Let me show you_," it purred before suddenly biting into his neck.

Zach startled awake. He saw nothing in the dark. Not even the flat wall of the cardboard box he slept in. The rain had stopped and it was quiet. Too quiet for a city filled with trash diggers, gutter runners, and hazy street light scavengers. He was awake, but none of the voices in his head had woken with him. Either that, or they were too scared to talk. Zach's cold shiver turned into a sweat. This dark stillness felt too much like the place in his head where the voice had violated his subconscious. He was desperate to break the silence, but he was too afraid to move. If the darkness had followed him into reality, the fangs from his nightmare might have too.

Persian, the black devil cat, was still out there. The streets of Midtown weren't safe. They never were, but this was the first time in a long time that Zach was consciously aware of it. And just like his dream, there was no one to cry out to. No one to call upon for help or comfort.

And then there was _that_ woman.

Baby was nothing to Zach, so it was only appropriate that her voice popped up in his head when there was nothing and nobody else to listen to. Her words of warning drifted along the top of his paranoia: _It's not safe to be out here by yourself_, she had said, but was he really by himself?

Zach twisted around to look behind him. The spot at the bottom of his back where Minun and Plusle liked to sleep was empty. So was the one near the top of his shoulders, beside his arm, and around his feet. The two pokemon were gone. Those parasites never missed an opportunity to sneak in when he was asleep, so where were they now? Zach felt around the box and then his persons. The two cheering pokemon weren't attached to his ankles, stashed under his coat, or tucked away in his pockets. He patted the inner lining of his jacket just to be sure and then rubbed his hand over the dry scratchy cardboard where the two pokemon should have been. If they weren't inside with him, then they were outside by themselves.

_It's not safe to be out here by yourself_

Zach's eyes drifted to the small opening between the flaps of the cardboard house. It was night time, but the wet nature of the ground outside reflected just enough light for his dilated eyes to see. The light was a pale grey and carried a hollow cold glow that Zach didn't want to disturb, much like the radiation of a tombstone under a full moon. If Minun and Plusle were indeed outside, then they were either lost or alone. Otherwise, their late night shenanigans would have woken him up hours ago. It was too quiet for a pair of cheering pokemon to be carousing around at midnight.

_It's not safe_.

Zach slowly pushed open the flap. The scratch of the cardboard echoed loudly in the silence. At this angle, he couldn't see anything beyond the low hanging tarp. He'd have to go outside if he wanted answers. Zach tried to hollow himself like the glow, keep himself cold and detached and unaffected by whatever he might discover, but his heart still pounded loudly in his chest. Minun and Plusle were small low ranking pokemon. Anything could snatch them up despite their special attack capabilities. _That was the way of the streets_, Zach reminded himself.

It was only a matter of time until something like this happened.

And yet he couldn't help but hope. Damn that Baby and her contagious virtues.

Zach crawled out from underneath the tarp and hit his hand against something soft and damp lying outside of his door. The alley was dark, especially when the tall shadows of the surrounding buildings blocked out the dim glow of the street lights farther on, but the wet shine of a rain soaked city glared offensively at him even in the night. The heap near his hand was relatively small but shapely, indicating it had form and substance. Several dark spots down the alley indicated there were more of them, all slightly different from one another. It wouldn't be the first time people dumped their garbage in his alley, but the heaps were too equally spaced to be the work of late night polluters.

Zach rose to his feet and the shadows rose with him, shedding more light onto the shapes. Feathers formed first. Then fur. Broken wings, glassy eyes, twisted limbs and finally the gapping mouths of voices that would never scream again. The spots darkening the ground weren't heaps of trash at all. They were bodies. Dead pokemon carried and dropped on his doorstep as if they were addressed to him. Zach looked down at the mangled face of the pokemon he bumped into on the ground. A rattata by the looks of what remained of its tail. Its pained expression was as frozen as its body, the horror of a bloody and violent end forever imprinted on its corpse. Zach stiffened in a shared rigor mortis, one induced by the sudden onset of an inescapable and undeniable fear.

At the far end of the carnage, where the clothesline cut across the pitch black gate of hell, the devil drew near. It stepped into the perimeter of Zach's vision, revealing itself simply because no human could ever hope to find it otherwise. Its body was made of palpable shadow. The hard glisten of the crown jewel in its head and the softer reflection of its muzzle were all that distinguished the devil's head from the darkness. The rest of its face was pitch black and its eye sockets were as empty as the holes in a skull. Something writhed in the devil cat's mouth. The way it struggled in pain twisted a grin around Persian's lips. She slowly squeezed her prey between her teeth until the body sparked. When it did, she added a new piece to her collection and dropped the heap on the ground. Her paws glistened in the pale light next to it almost as brightly as the wet ground.

It was then that Zach remembered that it hadn't rained for hours.

Persian lifted her head and her long white fangs seemed to stretch into needles. Black saliva ran along the bottom of her lip. Two tiny pin pricks of light became her eyes and she looked at Zach, stabbing his soul with an _ice shard_. Zach came to a sudden realization. He was going to die tonight and she was going to kill him. There was no doubt in his mind about that. These were the streets of Midtown.

It was only a matter of time.

Ten seconds, maybe two, if Persian decided to pounce instead of stalk her way to her next kill. Death would come in an instant. There was also one thing Zach knew to be faster than death: a no good rookie cop who thought she could save the world by sticking her nose into other people's business. A cop who stopped by earlier that day and slipped a canister of super repel in the bag of poke-treats she gave him because she knew he wouldn't accept it otherwise.

Zach pictured the bag in his mind. He knew exactly where it was: Two inches up and three inches back from his left hand, stuffed safely in the lining of his jacket where he knew Plusle and Minun couldn't get to it. When he first found the canister inside the bag, he refused to ever use it, but he also couldn't bring himself to throw it away. Persian flicked the tip of her tail into the cold light. It snapped like a whip against the stillness of the rest of her body. She was watching, waiting for him to make his move. Zach swallowed the bile rising in his throat. It would take five seconds to reach into the bag and grab the super repel. His chances of out pacing Persian were marginal, but he had to try. His survival depended on it.

Zach thrust his hand into his jacket pocket and Persian launched through the alley. She vanished right before his eyes, melting instantly into the dark with her sleek black fur, never to reappear again, even when she plowed into the center of Zach's chest. Together, they crashed backward into the tent, knocking several poles out of place, snapping wires, and crushing cardboard with the force of a two-ton wrecking ball. The hit knocked away what little breath Zach had clenched between his frozen lungs. When his back hit the ground, something cracked under the weight of the monolith pressing him into an early grave. He didn't feel anything, only the pinch of the repel trigger under his thumb when it slammed against his chest.

The super repel discharged into Persian's face with the spitting force of a seviper. Treat cubes splashed into nearby puddles, but it was Persian's voice that made the liquid shudder. She threw her head back in a roar and tore away from Zach, ripping through his heavy overcoat faster than tissue paper. He rolled over, gasping for breath, and dropped the empty can. It wasn't enough to keep the cat away for long, but it bought him time. How much, Zach didn't know, but he wasn't going to waste a millisecond of it. He scrambled to his feet and ran, tripping and kicking through the dead bodies without considering if any of them were still alive. Escape was all that mattered. Not the pain in his chest from the fall, the brush of blood against his ankles, or the warm smell of piss running down his trousers.

When the devil was at your back, close enough to lick the sweat from your neck, the physical world didn't matter. Nothing did. There was only fear. Pure and absolute terror.

Zach splashed through the compound as fast as his bad leg would go. His steps echoed for miles through the steel and concrete canyons rising up beside him. The city watched without pity or remorse as the hunted stumbled into a small breezeway between two of the buildings. It grew narrower the farther Zach went in, forcing his shoulders sideways in order for him to fit. Old construction materials littered the path, making it difficult to navigate, but if he had trouble, so could Persian.

Zach knocked over a stack of two-by-fours leaning against the wall behind him. They clattered across the opening, successfully blocking it from further entry, but not before Persian swiped a paw-full of his coat tails. She yanked Zach back, snarling and scratching at the wall until dust flew from the brick. Zach grabbed his coat with two hands and ripped himself free. He lost his balance and fell into several dry rotted pallets.

They broke underneath him, dislodging a pile of scrap farther up ahead. Various plastics and metal shreds rained down from above and he knocked them away to look back at the entrance. Persian remained hidden by the night, but the disturbing sounds she made trying to break through the obstruction revealed her presence. And when the sounds abruptly stopped, Zach knew better than to think she had given up the hunt. She was simply looking for another way around.

Fueled by another burst of adrenaline, Zach clambered out of the breezeway, dove under the broken chain link fence at the back, and scrambled to his feet. Something popped in his bad knee, his leg gave out, and he hit the ground hard, splashing into a muddied puddle of metal dust and weeds. Zach looked up and wiped the slime from his eyes. The pitch black spires of Reynold's Power Plant bit into the cloudy horizon high above him.

Thunder rumbled in the distance behind it. Lightning flashed in a growing plume of clouds beyond. The next wave of storms was quickly approaching. Electricity scared off Persian once before. Maybe it would do it again, but would lightning strike the plant before the devil cat caught up to him? The barbed wire fence around the perimeter would only hold her back for so long. Zach would have to go inside the plant and hide until the storm blew in to test his theory. The thought paralyzed him almost as quickly as Persian's stare. Even the worst degenerates and crack addicts the city had to offer knew better than to seek shelter behind those gates. Nobody went into Reynold's Power Plant and nobody came out. Not ever.

Not until recently.

Zach grunted, forced himself up, and hobbled closer to the plant. He shoved his way through the nearest door and stopped as an unfathomable darkness stole what was left of his vision. It even swallowed the sound of his arrival, making the dim light of a cloudy midnight behind him bright against its vast empty depths. It felt like the darkness of his dreams. The place where the voices in his head liked to talk to him. And as if summoned by his appearance, whispers trickled down through the darkness. They came and went like the swiveling of gossiping lips. So this was where the voices were hiding.

Oh, how he missed them, those curious, cautious, beautiful voices that broke the silence of his living nightmare. Zach had never been so relieved to hear them in all of his life. He swayed deeper into the darkness, shuffling across the floor and reaching with both hands to keep from running into anything. The shadows were so thick that not even Persian would be able to find him in here. All he had to do was find a good place to hide and the storm would take care of the rest. Lightning strobed outside, illuminating broken window panes along the far wall. The front was growing closer and each flash shaped the darkness into more navigable forms.

Zach felt his way between two large machines and stuffed himself inside. A series of cables blocked the way to complete isolation behind them, but any type of seclusion was better than being out in the open. Another flicker of light blinked across the ground at the end of the makeshift tunnel, and this time, thunder chased after it. The sound eased Zach's panic. It reminded him that he still lived and breathed in the real world. The voice from his nightmare couldn't be heard over the lingering buzz of electricity within the machines. Reynold's Power Plant still had power to it, an energy all of its own that resurfaced with every storm. It never truly died after the explosion. Zach could see that now. He could feel it, tingling his senses with a current that ran in a way so similar to his own.

From the outside, the plant intimidated mortal men, including himself, but when compared to the evil fornicating in the streets this night, Reynolds was a dream come true. A true testament to the power of life. Zach misjudged the place. He wondered how many years he could have spent sheltered inside getting to know the machines and how they worked. Maybe even giving them a purpose once again. Given the chance, he would explore the plant come daylight, but neither the sun nor the storm proved fast enough to save him.

The voices stopped speaking. They scattered as something far scarier than disembodied whispers approached. It had to be Persian. She must have entered the power plant the same way he did. Zach's fears rushed to life again. He stared at the opening between the machines, acutely aware that were no timbers or trash to block it. Narrow spacing wouldn't stop the devil from coming in and tearing him to shreds. Persian couldn't see in absolute darkness or smell after a dose of repellant, but she could still hear, and Zach's heart beat so loudly in his chest, he thought it might explode, just like the power plant. If he stayed still, she might find him. If he ran, the sound of his steps would give him away. There was no way to win or to fight.

All he could do was pray.

Another bolt of lightning flashed across the floor. A shadow darted across it faster than the sharp pitch of a horror movie. Zach held his breath, listening for the sound that would signal the beginning of the end, but the thunder rolled in too quickly. He couldn't hear anything.

But he could _feel_ something.

Zach slowly peered over his shoulder at the line of cables strung up beside him. The darkness beyond grew heavy, so much so, that the night slowly dropped it like the first prick of blood from a needle stick. The devil's heavy chin formed first. Then, her massive maw, and finally, her head. It silently crept by along the cables. The jewel on Persian's head held the faintest of glows, too aroused with the thrill of the night's slaughter to stay dark and quiet during the hunt.

Zach watched her float by mere inches from his own head. Shadow slipped into shadow, and soon, the glow was gone. Silence returned. Zach removed his hand from his mouth and closed his eyes. It was the moment every predator waited for. Having seen the glint of Zach's eyes from the light of her jewel when she passed, Persian sprang into the cables with a snarl. Her white teeth materialized out of the dark and her claws severed through the wires. Some jerked out of place, sparking and popping with the latent energy stored within the machines' capacitors.

Old parts short-circuited. Motors churned and rusty flywheels began to spin again. They shrieked back to life, rattling the walls with triple digit decibels. Not even Persian's roar could be heard above the metallic screams. Zach slapped his hands over his ears and shimmied out of the cavity. It was his only chance to escape. He ran out into the open, blindly stumbling and tripping over parts and pieces of broken machinery. Behind him, the belt within the flywheel snapped and the machine went dead, but the screaming didn't stop. And neither did Zach. He raced out of the plant, tore across the property, and scaled the barbed wire fence without pain, or dignity, or care. Survival was all that mattered.

And this time, he didn't make the mistake of looking back.


	8. Chapter 8

**Chapter 8**

Zach collapsed somewhere between Paras Plaza and 38th Street, utterly wide eyed and panicked. Two whores working the park nearby saw him fall and moved down the block to smoke their cigarettes in peace somewhere else. Had they known of the true evil prowling these streets, they would have run straight into the nearest confessional.

Zach laid on the ground and wondered why he wasn't dead yet. Miles separated the park and the power plant, yet Persian had failed to materialize from the darkness. It's possible she lost the trail, but the night wasn't over just yet. She could be minutes, maybe even seconds behind him. Zach propped up on his elbows. He didn't know how he had the strength to stand or why he ended up beneath a street light, staring at the front door of the police station with a fixated intensity. The whole trip was a blur, but the path in front of him was clear.

If he walked into the station ranting and raving about being attacked by a black devil that was responsible for countless deaths around the city, they'd lock him up in a strait jacket and cart him off to the nearest asylum. Zach already paid his dues to such institutions and had no intention of going back, even if it killed him. There were faster, more natural, less painful ways to die. Persian being one of them.

Still, Zach stood underneath the protective glow of the street light, watching and waiting for something he didn't understand. It could have been some sort of childish response ingrained into his brain as a kid, or maybe even some twisted sense of humor to be murdered on the doorstep of the local precinct, but he couldn't bring himself to leave. Zach started to pace and glanced back and forth from the sidewalk to the door. Having lost his favorite hat earlier that night, the longer parts of his hair dangled in front of his face.

No one came or went from the station and the surrounding sidewalk was quiet. Not that there would be any late night solicitors this close to the station anyway. A bubble of expected morality kept the riff-raff away, including Zach. He was a well-recognized chronic nuisance by many of the beat cops on patrol. With no answers at the front, Zach moved along the perimeter of the two story brick building to the back. Here, he could watch and wait a bit more discretely for whatever it was he was looking for. Various police officers, some in uniform and others with duffel bags in their hands, moved between the squad cars parked along the building and the adjacent lot. It must have been the crossroads of a shift change, otherwise, the back of the station would have been as quiet as the front.

Loitering this close to a badge parade was risky. If a single officer spotted a character like him lurking around at this hour, or any hour in fact, he'd be taken in and treated like a terrorist. Zach wasn't sure why he risked his life like this, especially when he fought Persian so hard for it, but maybe he'd find answers in the soles of a pair of lotad rubber rain boots.

Baby stepped out into the parking lot and stuck her hands in the pockets of her brown leather jacket. She was the last to leave the building and remained unaccompanied by her fellow checkered hats, even when she passed them in the parking lot. In fact, her hat was the only one that stayed on as she left the station. Baby kept her eyes and ears focused on the traffic moving through the lot instead of her phone. She walked every bar of the crosswalk when the little light told her to go, and when she hopped back onto the sidewalk on the other side, she stayed to the right in proper pedestrian etiquette, even when no one else was coming.

Rain started to sprinkle the cement from above, prompting Baby to open up her unsightly colored umbrella. Zach didn't even feel the rain anymore. He only watched, aghast that none of the other officers saw her leave by herself. A young woman traveling on foot this late at night without company was every predator's dream. What the hell was Baby thinking? Didn't she follow her own advice?

It wasn't safe for her to be out here by herself.

The storm finally rolled in over Midtown and lightning cast sharp flashes of light across the sky. Thunder snarled after it the like the spring of Persian's teeth through the cables at Reynold's Power Plant. Undeterred by the sound, Baby continued across the street and boldly walked into the darkness. Filled with a sudden sense of urgency, Zach pawed through the decorative shrubbery and hurried out onto the sidewalk after her.

A twinge of pain ran through his legs, causing them to spasm and stiffen. It wouldn't be long until they gave out again, and this time, Zach wasn't sure he would be able to recover. He was running on borrowed time, but who better to steal more from than the young?

Baby picked up the pace now that she was away from the station. She was two blocks ahead by the time Zach honed in on her trail. He glimpsed the top of her umbrella as it bobbed up the metal stairs that led to the above ground Metro Line. At this rate, she'd board the train without him and she'd be lost to the night forever. Zach pulled himself up the stairs a few minutes later. His bad knee locked up, slowing his ascent considerably, and by the time he made it to the top, the train had already pulled into the platform.

The doors opened with several bursts of compressed air and Baby hopped into the nearest car on the other side of the platform. Zach tracked her sideways and jumped into the last car on the line. Ticket takers didn't work this late, and even if they did, they knew better than to bother a heavy breathing smelly homeless man in a tattered overcoat with a twitching eye and unshaven face. The only other occupant of the car, a man who looked rather rugged and ill-mannered himself, promptly got up and left at Zach's appearance.

The departure tone dropped, the doors closed, and the train started moving again. Zach walked up the car and through the compartment doors into the next section. A white wired haired individual in a ratty plaid shirt snored in the center seating. The man from before, fully unabashed with prejudice, got up and moved again. Zach ignored him just as quickly. There was only one straight laced ponytail he was looking for and he found it in the next section.

Baby sat in a seat by herself, surrounded by a handful of other late-nighters. As she settled in, several other passengers put earbuds in their ears and books in their laps. They must have seen her in her uniform before. It explained why Baby could distractedly fiddle with the bandage on her chin while watching the Northside portal for any suspicious entrants. Every so often, she also glanced back to the south as an extra precaution.

Zach ducked out of the window before she spotted him. He couldn't bring himself to enter the car. If he approached her now, it would only agitate the other passengers and draw more attention. He was looking to hide, not stand center stage. Zach paced outside the door, wringing his hands as if the motion powered his steps. Baby was the only person in the whole city who could help him, but what could she do when she found out Persian attacked him again, jump from a moving train and rush off into the darkness torch in hand?

It was ludicrous, but not completely unimaginable.

Zach forced himself into the nearest plastic bench. He didn't have to talk to Baby. Just knowing that she was on the other side of the door was enough for now. He'd wait until the train stopped to "accidentally" run into her and explain his circumstances. His legs needed the rest and the humanoid drooling a few seats over wasn't disturbed by the intrusion. He might as well enjoy the ride.

The train continued to slide through the city. It jostled lightly when the tracks changed, causing the lights to flicker every so often. Zach cautiously watched the shadows, especially those in the farthest darkest corner, and wondered if Persian would pop out at any moment. No one else entered his car, although one or two from Baby's left along the way.

Eventually, Baby stood up to depart at a station the rest of the passengers would have liked to pass by completely. Again, Zach tracked her sideways off of the train several car lengths away. The night engulfed him the moment his feet hit the boards. One orange light illuminated the platform and its reach was limited to the access door of the teller's booth. A closed sign hung in the window. On this side of town, the attendants were sent home before dark.

Baby trotted off of the train, across the platform, and down the metal stairs with the speed of a recognized but unavoidable exposure to late night danger. Zach struggled to keep up with her and sacrificed his stealth with every hobbled step down the rusty metal stairs. He would have tripped at the bottom but his stiff knee wouldn't bend and it kept him standing upright.

The streets were darker out here. Baby would have disappeared had she not stopped underneath the light of the crosswalk to let a semi-truck, most likely hauling an illegal delivery, pass by. She looked especially vulnerable under that small beam of light surrounded by depravity and darkness. At any moment, a freak in a mask could run up and assault her, throw her in the back of a sketchy unmarked van, and start a new line of milk cartons with her unimpressionable face on it.

And Zach thought his neighborhood was bad.

Determined to call her out for being a hypocrite, Zach followed Baby several more blocks until she stopped on the stoop of a shabby brownstone building and pulled out a set of keys. It was the perfect opportunity to prove a point. Zach marched up the steps with surprising ease, acutely aware of how soft his steps had become and how easy it was to sneak up behind her, smell the shampoo in her hair, and count the chains in the necklace around her neck. Such a soft small neck…

It would take ten seconds, maybe two, to grab it and give her a good scare, but Baby had sensed his intent in less than five. She whirled around, pepper spray in hand, and discharged the canister into Zach's face. He bounced backward into the railing of the landing behind him, spewing a stream of curses so foul that only devils would recognize the language.

"Shuckle-fuck, woman!" he swore. "What the hell is wrong with you?!"

Never off-duty officer Cofield instantly recognized the overcoat and accompanying snarl. She gasped so hard that her eyes nearly popped out of her skull. "I'm so sorry!" Baby cried. "I thought you were a stalker!"

Zach replied with a series of R-rated unmentionables, wiped his eyes, and kicked the railing on the steps for good measure. Baby quickly pulled him away from the fall hazard and into the building. She dropped her umbrella and dug in her bag for a water bottle. No sooner did the cap appear did Zach snatch the plastic from her hands, lean back, and pour it over his eyes.

Spots of water darkened the musty discolored carpet like blood, spurring Baby to remedy the situation as quickly as possible before the landlord heard the commotion and came out. She pushed and pulled the walking encyclopedia of profanities up several flights of stairs and reassured a couple of curious neighbors that she had everything under control.

Zach blindly winced and squinted down the hallway until they came upon a rather small and unimposing apartment door. His already beaten face had gone numb, but the burning in his ears hadn't stopped due to Baby's continued apologetics. She unlocked the door, threw her shoulder into the warped corner to open it, and stumbled inside with the rehearsed poise of an Olympic failure. The light switch popped when it turned on and a single overhead light hummed dimly to life.

The apartment was longer than it was wide and ran perpendicular to the door, showcasing a single large multi-paned window that glowed with neon advertisement light. Zach's shoulders brushed the doorframe as he entered. Two steps brought him into the center of the living room, the dining room, the bedroom, and kitchen, all at once. A mid-sized refrigerator and half a cabinet made up the kitchenette on the left wall.

To maximize floor space, the table was pressed up against the wall directly across from the entrance. A single cockeyed chaired poked out from underneath the corner. Only a few small inches separated the back rest from a second hand dresser. The bed was aligned with the right side wall, leaving no room for a night stand in between. At the foot of the bed, the open bathroom door doubled as a closet. Baby snatched an undergarment from the doorknob and stuffed it under her mattress. She then darted back to the table and pulled out the chair.

Still blind with excessive tears and matching snot, Zach pawed around the room until he found something soft and fabric like to clean his face with. Baby returned to his side, steered him into the chair, and filled his free hand with a small bottle of liquid. She said something along the lines that it would help cool the burning, but there was too much technical gibberish in between her continued apologies to make out more than that. Zach washed his face with the coolant and rubbed his hands into his eyes to make sure it filled the cracks. Relief came almost instantly, tingling his skin with the rare magic of modern medicine.

It didn't take long for the swelling to subside and his vision to clear. Whatever antibiotics, probiotics, pesticides, vitamins, steroids, or class II narcotics the scientists used to make this, they couldn't have been cheap. Baby had some Grade A stuff. Just how many times did she spray herself in the face before she invested in it? Zach blinked back into focus. It helped that there wasn't much to look at: Gray sheetrock walls, a couple pieces of furniture, and a distinct lack of color from ceiling to floor. At least he could draw on the walls of his cardboard box if he wanted to.

Baby continued to fuss about the room. She tugged the blanket over the corner of the bed and shuffled around the dirty dishes in an attempt to tidy up the mess that was her personal life. But not without her manners, she turned on a kettle, opened the fridge, and rattled around the empty racks for scraps.

With clearer eyes, Zach glanced around the room again. There was one set of dirty dishes in the sink. One toothbrush in the bathroom. One chair. One pillow on the bed. Not a hint of a one night stand. The only suggestion of a male presence in Baby's life was a picture of a man on the dresser wearing a checkered hat, blue coat with brass buttons, and white gloves. The picture was propped on top of a rectangular wooden box. It acted as a backdrop for a triangular glass case that had a flag in it. A single flower, probably pulled from the drowning weeds outside, drooped over the lip of a small recycled cup in front of the display.

Zach wasn't sure he could believe it. Baby, the spoiled milk sucking goody two-shoes brat, lived alone in a two-bit apartment on the wrong side of town. She had no one to call. Not a crumb in her cupboard. Nothing. Absolutely nothing.

Just like him.

"I did some research," Baby continued to prattle on, completely unaware that her guest hadn't been listening since getting sprayed in the face. "The pokemon that attacked us in the alley is actually a subclass of Persian native to the jungles of the southern continent called _Pantheria Neopardius_. They're considered a Grade X species of pokemon: untamable. 100% wild. Researchers can't study them because they never live longer than a few years in captivity, even when born and raised in a lab. Something in them just snaps and they go crazy. It doesn't help that they are twice the size of a normal classy cat. They even have an affinity for dark type attacks."

"That black devil is why I'm here," Zach interrupted, snapping out of his thoughts.

Baby assumed as much since the _Pantherian_ Persian was the main thread between them. She took it upon herself to continue sharing the fruits of her research. "Pantherians aren't black," she informed. "Their fur is actually such a deep purple that it only looks that way. In the right light, you can even see that they have spots-"

"Who gives a damn about spots?!" Zach shouted. "That monster tried to kill me!"

"It tried to kill me too, but that's no reason to shout about it."

Zach could have slapped her, but he had forgotten who he was talking to. "She attacked me again just a few hours ago," he explained.

A grave expression weighed down Baby's smile. Her eyes darted between the holes in Zach's clothing. Her hand went to her empty pokebelt. Rookies weren't allowed to carry their assigned pokemon partners off of the clock, but it didn't stop her natural instincts from kicking in.

"She chased me into the plant," Zach explained before Baby started out the door, torch in hand. "And I ran here the first chance I got."

Baby didn't need to know that he had been following her since the police station, and luckily, she was too distracted fulfilling her role as civil servant to realize that she never gave him her address. A real detective would have dished out more than a serving of mace. Remembering the chase reminded Zach just how tired he was. He rubbed his aching knee with a wince.

Baby incorporated his disabilities into her calculations and traded her belt for the bandages on her hands. She paced lightly in front of the table and stopped a few steps in. Another attack wasn't surprising, but Zach's appearance was. The two of them barely escaped the first time around when working together, so how did just one person manage to survive relatively unscathed?

"How did you escape?" Baby asked, jumping ahead of herself.

Zach thought carefully about what he wanted to say next. Did he tell her about the power still coursing through Reynold's plant or his humiliating display of desperation between here and there? What would Baby say if she knew what Persian had done? What would she do when she found out about the bodies? Zach had to balance his survival with the truth in order to make this work.

"Another lightning bolt struck the plant and scared her off," Zach explained.

Baby nodded and looked out the window at the storm. "She probably associates the sound with the shock she got in the alley. I'm not surprised it spooked her. We humans aren't as easy to kill as she thought." Baby then turned to him and winked. Zach was too surprised to speak.

"A close strike like that will make anyone jump," Baby continued, "but our _Pantherian_ seems especially sensitive to the sound, like she's never experienced a storm out in the open before." Baby wagged her finger at her thoughts. "This is important. If she has never been in the open before, it means she wasn't taken from the wild. She was raised in captivity, which would explain her behavior. It's possible she spent most of her life in a lab or a pokeball. Either way, humans were involved and humans leave a trail."

Zach relaxed into his chair. Baby picked up the scent without recognizing his own. She would take care of his pokemon problems and he wouldn't have to lift a finger.

"The black market for pokemon is huge," Baby continued to piece together. "Aces, poachers, and researchers alike would love to get their hands on a rare pokemon like that. But who specifically? Birkdale doesn't have the scientific facilities or grants to sustain a big pokemon research project. The coliseum downtown draws in most of the city's revenue. Tournaments, sponsorships, circuit fundraisers, elite clubs and parties, there's bound to be a dozen or more high profile collectors and trainers in the city at any given time. Taming the untamable is every aspiring Master's dream. A _Pantherian_ Persian would be worth a lot more alive than dead."

Baby's face brightened as a lightbulb blinked on above her head. She turned to Zach and he immediately regretted his chosen path of conversation. "You know more about the real nature of trainers in this city than anybody else," she began.

Zach wouldn't have phrased it quite like that, but that didn't change the truth of the statement.

"You can help me figure out where the _Pantherian_ came from!"

Cozying up to the police with blood on his hands was the last thing Zach wanted to do. When they strolled through death alley and found his tent, they'd put out a warrant for his arrest.

"Help you?" he barked. "You're the one who's supposed to be helping me! I almost died tonight!"

Just like a cop to think only of catching a collar. Protect and serve his ass. The only thing a checkered hat like Baby ever cared about was the glory of being a hero. Zach roughly stood up from the chair. It scratched across the floor and bumped into the dresser, causing the picture frame to rattle. Baby stiffened in surprise and Zach moved toward the door.

"Where are you going?" she asked.

Zach stopped a foot short of freedom. Where was he going? Somewhere, anywhere but here. Coming to her for help was a mistake on a multitude of levels. She should've never opened her door to him in the first place. He was a strange man with debased values and she was a young woman with no common sense. What if he decided to attack her right here, right now? She would have no means of fending him off. That freak in the mask under the street light could very well be him. Instead of assuming her visitor was leaving on frustrated terms, Baby should have prepared herself for a fight. She was a police officer for crying out loud. What in the world would ever make her think that any of this was OK?

Zach peered over his hunching shoulder at her. The kettle on the stove began to scream. Baby quickly turned her back to him, that naïve little idiot, and took the kettle off of the heat. On the counter beside it, there were two mismatched mugs instead of one.

"Why would you let a stranger like me into your house?" he suddenly asked.

Baby started fiddling with her hands again. She looked around the room but the big black wailmer in the middle couldn't be avoided.

"Well," she muttered, shrugging her shoulders to lighten the awkward burden of her confession. "I guess, I thought, we were sort of like . . . friends, given the circumstances."

_Are we friends?_

A cold chill crept through Zach's veins as the voice from earlier that night filled his head.

_I can make you something._

It sounded like it was right beside him, stroking the hair at the base of his skull where the bone was soft. He slowly turned toward the window. Rain peppered the glass like hail. Lightning flashed between the bars of the fire escape.

_I can take care of you._

Zach held his breath, paralyzed from heart to lung. His eyes burned more than ever before and tears spilled down his face. He should have known better. These were the streets of Midtown after all.

"What, what is it?" Baby asked, quickly coming up beside him. She placed her hand on his arm, saw the state of his eyes, and looked out the window with him. Lightning flashed again, but a large dark shadow on the rail refused to come to light.

_Let me show you, _it whispered.

Baby didn't finish her curse before she pushed Zach out of the way and the window imploded, showering the room with teeth, claws, and glass shards. The devil cat, Pantera, soared between Baby and Zach and knocked them each to opposite sides. Zach fell to the cement floor and agitated whatever had fractured in the alley. Baby stumbled into the fridge and inadvertently opened its door. It swung open behind her, catching Pantera's _slash_ down to the lead lining.

The entire unit dislodged under the force of her paw and smacked into Baby, throwing her into the cabinets. Her teeth barely missed the brass knob when her face clipped the corner. Zach flipped the table on its side and ducked behind it as if it were a war trench. Pantera scaled the obstacle in one leap, rebounding off of the wall and then the bed so that she pounced into Zach's back before he had a chance to carve his nails into the wood.

The hit flattened him against the floor and pushed the table forward. It struck Baby in the waist as she ran over to help, doubling her over the edge. She rocked backward and fell to the floor. Pantera kneaded her claws into Zach's back, ripping through layer after layer with each squeezing flex of her paws. He couldn't breathe. He couldn't scream, but Baby didn't need words to work.

She jumped up from behind the table, fire extinguisher in hand. Eyes aflame and hair askew, she pulled the pin and trigger. Cold white smoke exploded across the room, bleaching Pantera white so that not even the dead of night could hide her. The devil cat jumped away in a snarl and retreated back out of the window, hitting the dresser along the way. Several items of the display plummeted to the floor.

Baby tottered into the wall and dropped the fire extinguisher. Zach ran past her, his pain all but forgotten. He scratched and clawed at the door to try and get it open, but the warped wood wouldn't budge. Rain blew in from the window, soaking the rug below and tossing the curtains in crazed applause. Two rock steady eyes flashed with the lightning outside. Their reflective glare ringed the bottom of Pantera's gaze like the curve of a scythe. Cleansed of the powder by the rain, she leapt back into the room. Zach broke open the door, slipped, and swung to the side and into the hallway.

Likewise, Pantera slid on the sharp powder coated debris, careened past him, and crashed through the railing of the stairwell. She fell over the edge and dropped several levels before rolling to a stop on a landing below. Zach climbed up the remaining posts and looked down at her. Pantera kicked away the clutter and stood, licking away the disorientation as easily as blood from her lips.

Zach hobbled into the nearest door and banged on the wood until both fists went white. "Help!" he screamed. "Let me in!" The frame rattled stubbornly against him. Zach jiggled the door knob and it didn't budge. He threw himself even more vigorously into the next.

"She's coming!" he cried. "Let me in!" The dead bolt securely latched from the other side. A nosey neighbor opened their door a few spots down. Zach looked at them and they slammed it shut.

Pantera looked up at the broken landing and flicked her tail. She wouldn't have to climb the steps to the top if she jumped from the rails and crisscrossed between the bannisters. It would take three, maybe four leaps, tops. Zach slammed his forehead against the door of another painful rejection. He grimaced with the awful reality that was his fate. The door wouldn't open for him. None of them would. Deliverance didn't exist in hell.

Down the hallway, Baby rushed out of her apartment, sweating and bleeding from a small cut on her jaw. She spotted Zach down the way and waved at him with one hand. White powder smoked from her arm. "This way!" she yelled. "Over here!"

Zach lifted his head at the sound of her voice. He couldn't see how she had a plan, but if she had a way out, he would take it, checkered hat or not. Zach limped back down the hallway as fast as he could. Baby shuffled over to the railing, glanced over the edge, and slid back into place to meet Zach at the door. She held something in her far hand and tightly hid it against her thigh. She pushed Zach into the apartment with the other. "Take the fire escape," Baby instructed, "through the window!"

The window! The very portal that let the devil in would let its prey out. Of course!

Zach raced through the shattered glass, pushed aside the table, and slammed the chair up underneath the window. He climbed up onto the sill using his bad knee as a crutch. It didn't matter that glass filled his hands or that his ribs felt like they pierced his lungs. This was it. This was his way out. He would survive, if only for a few more seconds. Baby and her foolish righteousness would fend off the devil just long enough for him to salvage an escape. Why didn't he think of it sooner? Let Pantera kill Baby instead of him. Her death would be more than enough to buy him another day. The police might finally do something about the killer cat if it was one of their own that was slaughtered.

The fire alarm suddenly went off and it began to rain inside just as hard as it did out. A blaring alarm sounded, accompanied by a sharp blinking light. Zach stopped halfway through the window and looked back at the door. Baby had triggered the alarm, but instead of following her own escape route, she took a defensive position at the door. She raised whatever it was she had in her hand to match the line of her gaze but her reach extended beyond the doorframe so Zach couldn't tell what it was. Not that it mattered. Pantera couldn't be killed by mortal men. So why wasn't Baby trying to escape? Why wasn't Baby acting like him?

"What are you doing?" Zach shouted from across the room.

"Helping!" Baby shouted back. She didn't bother to glance over her shoulder to see if he had stayed to listen. Didn't she know that if he left, she was guaranteed to be Pantera's next victim? Baby shifted away from the door and into the hallway with the finesse of the officer that she was. She planned to take Pantera head on.

"Wait!" Zach shouted, climbing down from the window and falling off of the chair in the process. "You can't leave me!" He crunched through the glass again, kicking aside the empty wooden box that had fallen from the dresser.

Baby now stood at the edge of the broken railing where Pantera had fallen, hand aligned with her side again. She looked up at Zach's appearance. Dozens of tenants evacuated their rooms behind her, shielding their heads and handfuls of stuff from the rusty rain. Nobody paid them any attention. Not a single person screamed in panic at the sight of a demon. Bodies didn't drop to the floor. All that spilled was eight years of stale water.

Confused and expecting quite the opposite, Zach limped up to the broken railing on the opposite side of Baby and leaned over the edge. A steady stream of people grumbled and cursed their way down the stairwell. The only evidence of Pantera's attack was trampled and scattered underfoot. Zach and Baby slowly looked at one another from across the gap.

Pantera was gone, scared off by the alarm, but they both knew better than to think she had given up the hunt.


	9. Chapter 9

**Chapter 9**

A creature, of unknown birth and origin, yanked against the steel chain that leashed it to the metal table. Dressed in soiled rags and spittle, it had the look of a man but the mouth of a frothing gloom.

"Where's Baby?" it shouted. "I want to talk to Baby!" His demands shook the walls of the interrogation room.

"The only person you'll be talking to is me," the detective sitting on the opposite side of the table said. He applied a menthol rub under his nose. "So you better get used to it."

Sergeant John Lipton coolly watched the exchange from behind the two way mirror and rubbed a hand down his face. The interrogation wasn't going well and it was only getting worse. What was supposed to be a probing investigation into a potential suspect for the midtown alley murders had escalated into a pissing match between trench coats.

"You can't hold me like this!" the man in the ragged black overcoat shouted, and he wasn't far from the truth. They didn't have any hard evidence to link him to the crimes. At least, not yet, but Sergeant Lipton had a gut feeling that their unfriendly guest wasn't exactly innocent either. A 24 hour holding period wasn't long enough to force a confession out of a strong ill-willed beast such as this, but that didn't stop Detective Morris from trying.

"Witnesses pegged you at, not one, not two, but _three_ different crime scenes. How would you like to explain that?"

The only problem with Morris' report was that there was only one witness and she pleaded the creature's innocence, not his guilt.

"Because I'm the real witness here, jackass!" the man in black shouted. He twisted his wrists outward to reveal the handcuffs cutting off circulation to his clenched fists. "And you're treating me like a god damn suspect!"

Sergeant Lipton didn't like this progression of events. Detective Morris was blatantly obvious in his investigative approach and was riding a dangerously thin line between bending the truth and sheer misinterpretation of the situation. If neighboring tenants hadn't complained about a smelly homeless man disturbing the peace back at the apartment complex, they never would have been able to bring the man in the black overcoat down to the station. Mr. Black squirmed in his restraints like a freshly caught pokemon wearing a collar for the first time.

"I'm the victim here!" he yelled. "Can't you see?!"

"Oh, of course, how could I forget?" Detective Morris drawled. "You're being targeted by a big black cat that could swallow a man whole."

"It's not a cat, you idiot. It's a monster and it's out for blood, my blood!"

Sergeant Lipton noticed a small twitch in the man's eye. He wasn't familiar enough with the suspect to call it a tell but it wasn't the usual spasm or fit either. Mr. Black was either about to have a seizure or he was holding something back. The longer he remained chained, the more uncooperative he became. What if they were approaching this the wrong way?

"Nobody saw a big black pokemon at the apartments," Detective Morris explained. "Only a big man in a black overcoat harassing a floor full of renters, one of which, just so happened to be the very same officer that spotted you out of a crowd at a murder scene. So, what? After she started asking questions, you panicked and realized that your getaway wasn't as clean as you thought?"

"I'm not talking to you," Black declared as he wrestled with his chains.

"Did you realize you were made and followed her home?"

"Shut up!" Black struggled even harder.

"Did you want to kill her too, to keep your secret, or do you just like to play with your victims before ripping their throats out?"

Black slammed his fists down on the table. "I want Baby!" he shouted.

Detective Morris slammed his hands on the table and stood. "You keep saying that, but nobody knows who that is!"

Black growled with an inhuman ferocity and thrashed against his chains harder than a wild pokemon. At this rate, he'd gnaw his arm off.

"Shit," Lipton whispered as he rushed out of the viewing room.

Without access to sedatives or raid gear, Sergeant Lipton did the only thing he could think of just short of pulling the trigger to defuse the situation: he found Officer Cofield and returned to the interrogation room with her at his side. The two parties fell back into their seats when they saw her in uniform instead of her ripped street clothes.

"Thank you, Detective," Sergeant Lipton flatly stated, "but I'll take it from here."

Detective Morris' fingers twitched as the temperature in the room dropped about ten degrees. He debated swinging his weight around to stay in place, but the stripes on Lipton's uniform were like the stripes of an arcanine, and he wasn't trained to handle something of that caliber. Maybe after he gained a few more gym badges. Maybe never.

Officer Cofield hopped out of the way to avoid brushing shoulders with the tauros on his way out. When Morris was gone, Sergeant Lipton turned his attention to the black stain creeping over the edge of the table to get a better look at him. Black's scrutinizing gaze only grew narrower the farther he hunched into the table. Officer Cofield stepped forward, ruffled and ready to whip with a spoon.

"You're bleeding," she exclaimed. "You told me you were fine!"

All three looked at the red imprint on the table where Black had slammed his fists.

"I'm fine," Mr. Black muttered through his teeth before he tucked his hands close to his chest.

It was the first sign of retreat Sergeant Lipton had seen all night. "Officer Cofield," he said. She quickly jumped back in line. "See to it that his injuries are taken care of."

Good thing they conveniently kept a first aid kit in the corner. Surprisingly, nobody screamed when the peroxide came out. There was no shouting, kicking, or swearing of vile oaths. Officer Cofield managed to keep all ten fingers as she worked and Mr. Black didn't chew off her field dressing when she was finished. Sergeant Lipton watched from his favorite spot behind the mirror as she worked, fascinated by his officer's ability to chastise and sympathize her opponent into submission without ever realizing what sort of beast she was taming.

In a feeble attempt to maintain his dignity, Mr. Black continued to hiss and spit the whole time, but somehow, Officer Cofield saw through his every bluff. The two had a connection, but how far did her insight go? Sergeant Lipton got his answer when Officer Cofield asked permission to offer Mr. Black a change of clothes she had brought from home. It was against protocol, but people were starting to gag when they walked by the room, and Cofield made the valid point that Black would sooner soil their logo than wear it.

Cleaning the air between them might do both parties some good.

Black immediately refused the offer, but instead of arguing, Officer Cofield twiddled with the bandages on her hands. The garments in question were produced thirty seconds later. Mr. Black was escorted to the bathroom while Cofield waited in the interrogation room for his return. Her forward thinking was as disturbing as it was impressive. Their strange relationship was more complex than Lipton realized. He knew firsthand how people formed bonds after experiencing the same traumas, but Black's attachment to an officer of the law was a disaster in the making. He was a criminal, evidence or no evidence, and would sooner, rather than later, taint those involved with him.

This relationship needed to end as soon as possible.

Mr. Black returned from the restroom a new man. He wore a crisp white collared shirt under a navy blue overcoat. The coat was so deep a color that it almost looked black. Two sets of brass buttons ran down the front and ended at a set of matching trousers. They were the bits and pieces of a policeman's dress blues. Officer Cofield's father's to be exact.

God rest his soul.

If any of the other members of the force knew who she had given them too, they'd lynch her. Mr. Black wasn't thrilled with the outfit either. He moved around like he was in a full body pikachu suit until Officer Cofield produced a gray wool cap from behind her back. He secured it to his head with the reassuring sigh of a space helmet and leaned back in his chair with the brazen confidence of a salty sailor. Given a little more space, he would have put his feet up on the table.

That much arrogance was bound to be loose lipped.

Sergeant Lipton left the viewing room and opened the door to the interrogation room. Officer Cofield stood up, and after a nod from her superior, excused herself from the room. Sergeant Lipton closed the door behind her. He then turned to his guest with fresh eyes, searching for whatever it was Officer Cofield found so captivating. Black licked his teeth under his lips. A distasteful gesture at best. Criminals.

"Can I offer you anything else: food, water, a foot rub, or maybe a condo by the river?" Instead of engaging in playful banter like before with Officer Cofield, Black's face stiffened into a scowl. It couldn't be the sarcasm that annoyed him. Sarcasm was the basis of his entire vocabulary. It was the subtle mockery of Officer Cofield's attentive behavior to his comfort that tweaked a nerve. Just how sensitive was it?

"No? Alright then, I'll just have Officer Cofield bring us some tea."

"You can shuppet your tea right up your ass," Black answered.

It was the first intentionally hostile behavior Lipton had seen all night. The slight against Cofield had been taken personally. Why? No one in their right mind would attach themselves to what they considered their biggest enemy so easily, near death experience or not, but then again, they weren't exactly dealing with someone in their right mind. Black wasn't just obsessed about talking to Officer Cofield. He was possessed. Possessive. She was his "Baby" and nothing else. The looming disaster was closer than Lipton anticipated. All the more reason to cut it off at the head.

"Let's get straight to the point then," he picked up. "What happened back at the apartments?"

"I'm not talking to you."

"Let me guess. You want to talk to Baby?"

"And if I don't, you're not getting shit."

Now, he was making demands. It was a mistake letting him see her.

"Officer Cofield is not a detective on this case," Sergeant Lipton explained, "nor is she a lawyer." He tossed the case file on the table. Several items, including a couple of pictures exceptionally grotesque in nature, slid out onto the metal slab. Black kept his scrutinizing eye on the badge floating across the room.

"Let's start with the easy stuff," Lipton began. "What's your real name?" He picked up a sheet of paper from the stack and tilted his head so that he could read it. "Because I sure as hell know it's not Barnaby Jones."

Black would have crossed his arms over his chest if they weren't bound at the wrists.

"I could just call you what everyone else in the precinct does. . ."

Black settled deeper into his frown. The mention of his local nickname hit another nerve, as it should have considering it was a cruel condescending reference to his multifaceted personality.

"Yeah, I heard about you," Lipton prodded as he tapped a finger to his head. "You've got quite the rooftop party going on."

The frown tightened into a glare. Instead of putting up a fight as Lipton hoped, Black recessed into a level headed decision to make this as hard as possible. Continuing down this path would inevitably lead to another fit, only this time, it would be fueled with determination instead of fear and that was a whole different pokemon to catch. Sergeant Lipton back peddled and tried to invoke Officer Cofield's soothing aura without fueling Black's obsession with her.

"You're not going to talk to me, are you?"

Black smiled with a particularly sharp set of canines, like a mightyena just before it bites. Sergeant Lipton put his elbows on the table and ignored the files below him. They were as useful as Detective Morris. What he needed to do was follow his instinct, the same one that warned him about Black's interest in his officer.

"If you're not going to talk, then what are you doing here?" Lipton asked, trying to find the man behind the beast. "You said you had information about the recent murders. You even went so far as to recant the statement you gave me when we first met. I thought you didn't believe in superstitious black cats?"

Frankly, Lipton didn't either, but something changed since then and he wasn't so sure it was for the better. Black continued to stare at him with the underlying resentment of a primeape. He'd sooner stroke out than give up. If his demands were met once, they would be again. That's how desperate the police were to find the midtown murderer. All Black had to do was wait. A rap at the door broke the stalemate. Someone watching behind the glass wasn't happy. Unwilling to say anymore himself, Sergeant Lipton moved for the door. He didn't make it beyond the handle before Black surprisingly broke his silence with a question.

"Hey, Badges," he called.

Great, now he had a nickname too.

"You afraid of the dark?"

Sergeant Lipton looked over his shoulder. The two caught eyes at the corners. It was foolish enough to indulge Black's first request, even more so to stop at his beck and call, but this was possibly Lipton's last chance to communicate with this strange and unsettling creature before the man behind the mirror cut them off completely.

"No," Lipton answered.

Black leaned in low and slow over the table, dropping his hands into his lap so that the movement elongated the reach of his neck, and thus, the size of his teeth. "You should be," he warned.

Sergeant Lipton didn't take kindly to threats, or annoyingly persistent knocks at the door. He snapped down the handle and thrust it open, forcing the knocker back before he lost his nose. It didn't take more than five seconds for Lipton to realize that the knocker was his lieutenant and that he wasn't going to like what was about to happen next. The two entered the dark of the viewing room and left Black alone in the interrogation room.

"He's telling the truth," Lieutenant Blanchard said, "or at least, part of it." He held up a stack of papers. "The DNA results from all three victims came back positive for the same pokemon. Some type of rare Persian subclass called-

-_Pantherian Neopardius_," Sergeant Lipton finished as he rubbed his face again. He was starting to get a headache.

Lieutenant Blanchard paused in surprise but quickly recovered to spew out the exciting new development. He prattled on about abilities and statistics, hoping to sound as intelligent as possible, but Lipton had already heard it all before. Officer Cofield bombarded him with questions during her impromptu presentation on the subject earlier that night. Now, he had no choice but to believe her.

Sergeant Lipton looked through the glass, past Mr. Black, and beyond the grey soundproof walls into the breakroom where Officer Cofield was patiently waiting for further orders. Out of all the detectives, senior officers, and plaque polishing officials they had on this case, it was the rookie beat cop that got the best of them. Nepotism may have gotten Cofield this job, but she had some damn good instincts. They reminded Lipton not just of her father, but her grandfather.

"Sergeant Lipton," Lieutenant Blanchard called for the second time. "Are you listening? We're moving forward with this whether you like it or not." The lieutenant looked through the glass at Black, searching for some sort of mannerism that would reveal the evil machinations of the killer within.

"We still don't know how he's connected to all of this. Whether he lost control of his pokemon, purposely set it loose on the streets, or was cursed by a gastly, Officer Cofield is the only one he'll talk to. We're bringing her in." Blanchard's eyes widened with the prospects of catching a collar big enough to earn himself a name.

Lipton didn't need to be a detective to figure out the lieutenant's motive. He curled his fingers into a tight fist. "You want to use her as bait," he said.

"She's our best lead," Blanchard explained. "Our only witness. Our only connection."

"Our only rookie."

"Don't get your spinda in a twist," Blanchard growled as he whirled away from the mirror with drool on his chin. "It's not like we're stringing her up on a pole."

"Just a human stake."

"Officer Cofield knows the risks and has already agreed to help in any way she can."

"You approached her without telling me?!" The air between shuddered with a growing chill.

"I'm telling you now, aren't I?"

"My officers aren't pawns to be sacrificed for your gain!"

Lieutenant Blanchard nervously glanced through the mirror to see if Black overheard the statement. He remained as silent as before. "Might I remind you who the commanding officer of this precinct is," Blanchard declared with an icy huff of his breath.

Lipton stepped forward. "If anything happens to her-

-something has already happened!" Blanchard cut in before he started to shiver. "Twice!"

Lipton stopped short of shaking the man by the lapels. His hands quivered with fury but the lieutenant was right.

"It's only a matter of time until that Persian shows up again and I guarantee you that _rookie_ is going to be at the center of it. Let's face it, she's been marked. Put a leash on it now and we might reign in the monster before it kills anyone else."

Anyone else besides Officer Cofield.

Sergeant Lipton wanted to slaughter the grumpig grunting out hypocrisy in front of him, but he wouldn't be able to help his officer if he was suspended for insubordination. Besides, the order had descended from above and would not be disgraced by the opinion of a single sergeant. The voices on the horn wanted the midtown murders solved as soon as possible. When news of this reached the commissioner, there would be no stopping it. Officer Cofield would help catch the midtown murderer, just like she always wanted.

One death to end them all.

Sergeant Lipton stormed out of the dark and marched down the hall into the break room. To no surprise, Officer Cofield sat in the same seat as before, diligently waiting without question to walk headlong into danger. She popped up at attention when she saw him, subsequently spilling her paper cup of coffee onto her uniform. There was so much creamer in it that it might as well have been milk. Ignoring the stain, she stood stern, stout, and determined to fulfill his every request.

God damn it.

Sergeant Lipton stood in the doorway and looked her over. The bandage on her chin was gone, apparently knocked clean off when she fell face first into some cabinetry at her apartment. Replacing it was pointless because a large bruise grew from the far corner of her jaw towards her chin and was too tender to touch. Small cuts dappled her cheek within. Kissing a floor full of broken glass left one helluva hickey.

The bandages around Officer Cofield's hands were loose, tugged and rubbed raw with misplaced anxiety. Her hair was misshapen and fingernails dirty despite washing them three times in the sink. She stood lightly on her feet but her eyelids were heavy, so were the bags underneath, but working overtime after picking up a second shift had that effect on people. Sergeant Lipton would have told her to go home and get some rest if her apartment wasn't currently sectioned off with caution tape.

Maybe it was better this way. If he kept her here at the station, he could keep a watchful eye on her. One shout and an entire armory full of backup would be just around the corner.

"Officer Cofield," Sergeant Lipton said.

"Yes, Sir," she diligently answered.

"Congratulations. You've been assigned one of the most difficult, dangerous, and time sensitive cases to have ever come through this precinct."

"Thank you, Sir."

"Stay in the bunks tonight and get some rest. Tomorrow morning, you'll present your findings on the _Pantherian_ to the task force."

"Sir, if I may?"

"Yes?"

"It's 0500."

"And?"

"Tomorrow morning has already begun."

A smirk tickled the corner of Sergeant Lipton's mouth. Now, she sounded _exactly_ like her grandfather. Lipton quickly adjusted his stance to stand at Officer Cofield's height. "Very well then. Gather your books and let's see if we can't get this bastard to talk."

If her theory was correct, and Mr. Black was as innocent as he was jaded, then there was an entire coliseum worth of pokemon trainers to interrogate. Luckily, Officer Cofield spent her duty free hours in the database cataloguing potential suspects for the midtown murders the moment a pokemon was even remotely considered as a cause of death. It was standard operating procedure in any pokemon related case, but few took the time to categorize, organize, and harmonize the data into groups based on trainer classification, experience, skill, reputation, aspiration, badge count, and criminal history.

With the help of Mr. Black, she even narrowed down her list of potential suspects to three binders of sponsor worthy mug shots. The two continued to flip through pages of photographs even after Lieutenant Blanchard excused himself with a yawn. Sergeant Lipton wasn't so careless. He watched from behind the glass as task force officials came and went, unable to make heads or tails of Black's cooperation.

Lipton narrowed it down to two motives: either Black knew nothing about the murders and was so desperate to get off of the street that he would lie through his teeth, or he was playing them all into thinking he was innocent by setting them on any trail but his own. Officer Cofield was as gullible as she was loyal. She'd never be able to tell if she was being strung along or not, and that's what worried Lipton the most. Not that this whole thing could be a trap, but that they wouldn't be ready for it when it sprung.

It would be her father's death all over again.

Only this time, Lipton wasn't a knuckle headed rookie that needed saving. He was a sergeant and it was his duty to protect his house and all those who dwelled in it. The storm was coming, and if he couldn't stop it, he'd make sure Officer Cofield was ready when it hit.

He owed her father at least that much.

Nobody else had to die because of him.


	10. Chapter 10

**Chapter 10**

"_Dead_!"

"_Dead_!"

"_They're all dead_!"

The voices wouldn't stop.

"_Murder_!"

"_Murder_!"

"_Come and see!_"

They crashed against his sanity like the unending roar of a stormy ocean.

"_Murder_!"

"_Murder_!"

"And it's all because of me . . ."

Dozens of angry murkrow took flight as Zach pushed aside the clothesline that once marked off the alley he called home. A storm of black feathers barraged and berated him for the intrusion, circling and swirling about in a tumult of beaks and talons so thick that not even the rain could reach him. Zach ignored the screams of the living black cloud as it rose into the sky and looked down at the lake of blood lapping at his feet.

The bodies of a dozen pokemon rotted before him, twisted and broken and waiting on his doorstep for his return. The police had yet to discover the graveyard, but the stench of death would betray them soon, especially when it practically smoked from the ground. Zach wore a scarf around his face like a bandana to protect his senses, but the spheal imprinted fabric did little to stifle the smell. He stood still and heavy as the feathers brushed against him. His eyes were as glossy and distant as the ones at his feet.

The stiff crisp edges of his new jacket stood out sharply against his profile. They protruded from his innate inelegance like the monstrous fins or spikes of a malformed pokemon. The murkrow were wise to avoid them and quickly evacuated the alley, cawing and crowing all the while. A feast like this didn't come often. Zach quietly surveyed the scene before him. In the daylight, he saw every tooth and claw, every pound of uneaten flesh in perfect detail. Strangely enough, the morose topography wasn't as horrifying now as it was in the dark.

The murkrow had already devoured the most empathetic of parts, leaving behind hunks of meat not unlike those found in a slaughterhouse. Zach didn't know the faces or the names of the pokemon that died, but that was the case of every victim of the streets. Carnage was not new to him. Neither was scrounging through it. Zach carefully made his way through the bodies, stepping over and around the vague resemblances of pokemon, unable to find the ones he was looking for.

A strange gnawing tickled his stomach. It made him nauseous, especially when coupled with the hard ache in his ribs. Zach wrapped one arm around his chest to curb the sensation. Hope was unfamiliar to him. He shouldn't have felt it at all, but from beginning to end, he found no trace of Minun and Plusle within the butchery. They weren't hidden by wings or trapped underneath feet. Their disappearance was becoming increasingly unrelated to Pantera's killing crusade and the thought inspired escalating causality to the search.

Without a spark or jolt to pick up on, Zach focused on salvaging whatever supplies remained in the wreckage of his pipe and paper mansion. Even if he managed to clean up the bodies, he couldn't stay here anymore. The metallic stink of blood was so strong that he could taste it. The black devil had claimed this hell hole, and it was likely she would find him no matter where he went, but that didn't mean he had to make it easy for her. Surely, there was some shanty, slum, or breezeway still left unoccupied in Midtown.

He'd lay low and hide a while, just long enough for Baby and company to exorcise the devil for good. Zach drew the fallen tarp away and rummaged through the bent up cardboard. With the whole precinct on the case, he had no reason to stay involved. He just needed to survive. Maybe he'd find a better spot to settle down in. One where the smog wasn't so thick and it didn't rain all the time. One with enough space to fit a box big enough for three, not this ratty useless piece of garbage trash. Zach folded back the flaps of the refrigerator box and found what he was looking for. Minun and Plusle were inside.

"_Dead!_"

"_Dead_!"

"They're all dead," Zach whispered.

The two cheering pokemon didn't move. They didn't speak and they didn't breathe. Puncture marks riddle their bodies. Pantera's teeth had pierced straight through their tiny frames to the other side. Their little organs must have popped like ripe cherries in her fangs. They were probably ripped apart before the two helpless pokemon even knew what happened.

Minun had the worst of it. Enough blood bathed his skin to make him almost indistinguishable from his sister. He was dead long before Plusle ever found him and dragged him into the box, the only place they had ever felt safe. Her efforts left a bloody smear on the cardboard. It ended at the spot where her heart gave out. Zach dropped to his knees and pulled the scarf from his face.

The two cheering pokemon were dead, and had been for a while, but not before he had fled for his life from the alley. At least one of them had been alive when he ran through the bodies thinking only of himself. Zach slowly reached into the box and scooped the two pokemon into his hands. Their bones were crushed so thoroughly that the shapes of their bodies had concaved to unnatural proportions. Several bouts of shaking left their joints dislocated. Their ears, arms, and legs dangled limply over the sides of his hands.

The two cheering pokemon were nothing but broken bloody lifeless dolls in his hands.

Zach dropped the bodies so that he could hold himself up as he wretched over and over and over again. Even when there was nothing left, he coughed and hacked what was left of his hope into a slimy pile of acid and spit underneath him. The smell mingled with the sharp twang of iron and made him dizzy. Zach covered his eyes with one hand. He refused to cry. He hadn't in years, and if he did now, he'd never recover.

Who was he kidding?

Hope, happiness, escape from this horrid life, didn't exist. Even if he killed himself, right here, right now in grief, the souls of the underworld would send him back up again because this world was a living hell. Zach wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. His skin scratched against the stubble of his chin like sandpaper.

Those checkerboard fools would never catch the black devil cat. Pantera was out for blood and she wouldn't stop until the city drowned in it.

Zach slumped back to sit on his legs and winced as something pinched between his ribs. He wrapped an arm around his chest again and leaned back so that the rain could hit his face. If he couldn't cry, at least the storm could shed tears for him.

For them.

Something colorful caught the corner of Zach's eye. Baby's scarf remained clutched in his free hand. It was the same one he used at her apartment to wipe his face with. Taking it with him had been a natural reflex since there was nothing else to pinch.

Now, there was nothing left at all.

Pantera's appearance at the apartments wasn't by accident. That disturbingly cunning devil let him escape on purpose. She manipulated him into finding Baby so that she could kill them in one strike as originally planned. The plot failed, but their luck was running out. Baby couldn't help him. Zach could see that now. Pantera was a product of the streets and only something as evil and vile as herself would be able to stop her. Zach clutched the scarf tighter in his hand. If the devil couldn't be killed, he'd find the one responsible for letting her out and force them to put her back in, and thanks to Baby's picture book, he knew exactly where to start.

There was no evidence. There was no proof, but when Ace's picture showed up in the catalogue of potential suspects, Zach knew that damned sadist had something to do with it. He memorized the address on file and made no note of it to Baby. The cops were more likely to dish out a free pass than justice to a celebrity ace in this town. He'd take care of this himself, like he should have from the very beginning. That good-for-nothing knee smashing tyrant would taste the rancid justice of the streets he so despised.

"_Murder_!"

"_Murder_!"

The voices began again as the murkrow began to descend from the sky.

Zach pushed out of the cardboard, swayed heavily to his feet, and looked down into the cardboard box one last time. Minun and Plusle were dead. There was nothing more he could do for them. Their favorite cardboard box was the best grave they could get in this land of cement, steel, and rain. Zach turned away and limped off down the alley. There was nothing left for him here. The stench of death no longer bothered him, but he wrapped Baby's scarf around his face again anyway. After all, he'd need it where he was going.

Or better yet, for what he was about to do.


	11. Chapter 11

**Chapter 11**

"Would you put your hands down? You look like a god damn idiot."

Training Officer Michael "Guppy" Guerra had had enough. His incorrigible rookie partner hadn't stopped flexing, bending, and twisting since this morning's coffee and showed no signs of tiring. He was getting a cramp just watching her.

"I can't help it," Officer Annie Cofield replied as they walked side by side down the streets of Midtown. "Sergeant Lipton wants me to break in this new gear as soon as possible." She readjusted the bracers strapped to her forearms. Made of Kevlar and steel mesh, they matched the breathable padded chest plate wrapped around her torso. She looked more like a police action figure with all 800 accessories than a human. Riot gear and face shield sold separately.

Since when did protective custody turn into a shopping spree of the department's armory? Weren't people supposed to get whisked away to some shabby hole in the wall apartment instead of being thrown back onto the streets to fend for themselves? Then again, the one under protective custody was his partner, and his partner was supposedly being targeted by the Midtown Murderer, and losing a salary's worth of equipment was worth catching the biggest serial killer in the history of the city. If Guerra played his cards right, he might even be the one to land the collar. After all, the target on his partner's back was so big that the one on his own was practically non-existent. It was like the higher ups were trying to make her as noticeable and vulnerable as possible to lure the devil out.

"Just because you have to wear it doesn't mean you have to keep posing like a cosplayer every time somebody looks in your direction," Guerra snapped. More than one social media tagger waltzed up to them, asking to take a selfie with the officer in the fancy get up. It wasn't even like Cofield was pretty. He'd seen freshwater whiscash with more appeal than her.

"I'm not posing," Cofield blushed. "I'm just getting used to moving in it."

It was a miracle she could move at all. The whole uniform probably weighed as much as she did. Wrapping her in bubble wrap would have been cheaper and just as effective. The station couldn't even afford to retrofit her training officer's uniform even though he was walking in the same shit that she was. Then again, he didn't plan on sticking around when it all inevitably hit the fan. Guerra glanced over his shoulder at the unmarked police car following along on the street behind them. The plain clothes officers inside had orders to keep watch over the pair and jump out should the Midtown Murderer reveal himself. Guerra always said Cofield needed a babysitter. At least now, he wouldn't have to suffer alone.

Officer Cofield tugged a pair of fingerless gloves over her hands. They matched her new black uniform (because SWAT didn't come in any other color) and were completely outlandish for walking around in public with. It didn't help that the white bandages on her hands rimmed the edges underneath the gloves like something out of a Kung-Fu movie.

"You plan on taking down that big bad skitty with your fists or are you just afraid of scraping your palms on the sidewalk again?" Guerra asked.

Fighting a pokemon using hand to hand combat was for hillbilly wranglers and jock heads, not cops. Then again, he'd love to see her try, but for some reason, he could only picture her wrestling a miltank in the mud and failing miserably. It was a wonderful thought.

"_Pantherians_ are a very physical species," Cofield explained without acknowledging her partner's sarcasm. "And based off of her previous attack patterns, I'm almost positive she'll use her size and strength to her advantage instead of relying on long range attacks.

"She?" Guerra interrupted. "You get an up close piece of that action in the alley, Cofield? I didn't peg you as a pokemon poker but then again, I wouldn't be surprised."

Guerra warmed himself beside the heat of his partner's cheeks. In the beginning of their partnership, ruffling Cofield's feathers was difficult, if not near impossible given the shear thickness of her ignorance, but ever since the nickname "Baby" started floating around the station, she ballooned faster than a jigglypuff at the slightest lewd comment. The silence of her raging embarrassment didn't last long, however, as the doorman from the high rise next to them suddenly jumped out onto the sidewalk in front of them. He wore a burgundy red uniform with two sets of polished gold buttons down the front. They matched the trim of his hat and the gold inlay around the revolving glass doors of the front entrance. The man saw Guerra first, but once glance at Cofield and she might as well have been the Savior reborn.

"Perfect timing," the bellman huffed as he struggled to catch his breath. "The bastard's already on the 54th floor. You've got to go get him."

Guerra firmly based his entire lifestyle around the fact that he never _had_ to do anything. He knew Cofield's new uniform would draw attention, but this wasn't the blonde, giggling, coy sort that he liked. This was an invitation to free, untaxed, day ruining hard work. Guerra quickly held out his arm to distance himself from the sweaty red faced misunderstanding intruding upon his good humor.

"Hold on just a minute," he began. "I have no idea what you're talking about."

"Is someone in the building?" his partner interjected.

Just like a Cofield to stick their nose where it didn't belong. She looked up the side of the high rise with her pretend x-ray vison and pinched her eyes against the glint of chrome and glass. The architecture alone set the building into a higher tax bracket than the surrounding neighborhood. Guerra glanced around the front entrance of the condos, looking for a few strong armed security personnel and finding none. Million dollar condos with little security, little bellmen, and gaudy tastes meant one thing and one thing only in this town:

Celebrity Aces.

And sloppy ones at that. Ones that didn't want government representatives snooping around their personal business. The city was littered with pokemon trainers on a quick rise to fame with too much money and too many bad habits between their scattered tournament winnings.

"Does this bastard-_er_, person, live in the building?" Guerra asked. Depending on the answer, he might want to bring a spit mask.

"I've been working here for five years and I've never seen that guy in my entire life," the bellman answered. "He couldn't afford a place like this even if he sold his soul."

It was a pretty judgmental answer for a man who wore bells and buttons for a living, but given his experience, the trespasser was probably an ex-girlfriend or rival ace. Guerra preferred the latter.

"Do you know what he wanted?" Cofield asked.

"Hell if I know. The guy came out of nowhere and blew right past me, muttering to himself like a crazy person. I tried to stop him but he had this weird look in his eye, ya know?"

Officer Cofield stiffened a little.

"When he got to the elevator and couldn't get in, he assaulted me and stole my keycard!" the bellman explained.

Both officers noticed the significant lack of dirt and bruising on the bellman but said nothing to the effect. He probably handed over the keycard without a fight, but calling him out on it wouldn't change the fact that he was a lying shameless coward. It would only make their jobs that much more difficult.

"What did this guy look like?" Officer Cofield continued.

Guerra felt the hole they had stumbled into getting deeper and deeper.

"Big barrel of a guy with a messed up face, blue jacket, and blue pants."

Officer Cofield's expression hardened with something between recognition, disappointment, and irritation. The bellman, thinking he just escaped a brush with death from one of the FBI's most wanted, interpreted the look as a commitment to his cause and rushed ahead to open the side door of the condo's front entrance.

As if they could actually do anything with such a vague circumstantial complaint.

Officer Cofield reached up to her shoulder radio and called in to dispatch. Guerra quickly snatched her by the arm. "What the hell do you think you're doing?" he snarled, keeping as quiet as he could to preserve the agency's public image.

"Didn't you hear? There's a trespasser in the building?" Officer Cofield answered.

The only thing Guerra heard were the wails of an incompetent fat dirty doormat. "All we know is that there is a man on the 54th floor who probably forgot his key and took a complimentary one from the concierge without asking nicely."

"It wouldn't hurt to check it out."

"We aren't supposed to deviate from our search."

"This building is full of pokemon trainers. If we see one, we'll question them. Broadening the search only narrows the possibilities."

What was she, a meditite?

"We aren't supposed to go anywhere without back up."

"So we'll signal the guys like we did for all of the other apartment buildings we entered and they can follow along."

"But we're about to get off shift in fifteen minutes."

"Sounds like just enough time for you to prove me a worry walrein."

Guerra gnashed his teeth together. His partner was shorter than him by a full inch and yet she looked down at him as if she stood on the 54th floor. Given the chance, he'd push her off of it. Guerra released his partner as the dispatch operator answered the hail.

"12 David, show us responding at a potential 12-84 in progress at 552 Altaria Boulevard, the Oasis Condo Apartments," Officer Cofield said before she turned to the street and signaled the unmarked police car. The officers inside heard the call over the radio and signaled back. The pair was free to proceed and back up would follow shortly. There was no stopping the mission now without looking like a complete feebas.

"If this turns into overtime, you're cleaning the cruiser the next time somebody vomits in it," Guerra warned.

"You said it yourself," Cofield replied with a shrug and a smile. "It's probably nothing." She bounced up the steps like a baby hoppip and the bellman opened the door for her. Guerra begrudgingly passed through the portal and glanced around the crystal accented lobby, half expecting to see a mural painted on the ceiling. The architect must have had more modern tastes. The intruder wasn't the only one who would have to sell his soul to get a room in this place. Then again, Guerra might not have to. If he got in good with the staff here, he might be able to get access to the high profile amenities they offered, like the bar in the lounge off to the left. Rich women always loved a man in uniform.

"Just this way to the elevator," the bellman said. He hurried to the front of the group and motioned at the back wall. "The elevator requires keycard access on the ground floor, but once you're in it, you can use it freely from all upper levels." Guerra felt the sweep of well-planned delegation brush past him. "I saw the elevator stop at the 54th floor when the guy was in it, but he could be on any level now if he changed his mind or took the stairs."

This doormat was damned to think that they were about to do a floor to floor sweep of the building. Another concierge appeared and conveniently swept her keycard across the pad and pushed the little round button pointing up. That was about as useful as she was going to get. Did anyone here have any sense of responsibility? Then again, how could they when G.I. Jane was on the scene?

"It's a start," Officer Cofield said as the elevator doors opened.

"I'm sorry I can't go with you," the bellman finished, "but I have no one to relieve me and I can't leave my post unattended."

Of course not. At least, they wouldn't have to listen to his excuses any longer.

"We'll take it from here," Guerra reassured before stepping into the elevator. When the doors closed, he slumped against the wood paneling, crossed his arms over his chest, and jutted his jaw in his partner's direction.

"For someone married to the manual, you sure come up with some cockamamie schemes, you know that, right?"

"I don't get it," Cofield said.

Guerra couldn't tell if she was lying or not so he assumed the worst of her. "We just spent the whole day knocking and getting doors slammed in our faces by a couple of pompous pricks, and you want to bloody your knuckles some more? For what?

"Narrowing down the list of suspects for the Midtown murders takes boots on the ground and that's exactly what we're doing. There's a pokemon trainer in this building that was on the list of suspects, Suite 542 in fact. Seems coincidental, don't you think?"

"I don't remember anyone like that on the list."

"Not the final list, but it's worth checking out since we're here."

Guerra narrowed his eyes on his partner's back. It felt like she was hiding something, but she hadn't been dishonest or secretive with him about anyone or anything yet, and frankly, he was starting to think she wasn't capable of such a thing, so he brushed off the feeling. It was much easier to fall into his usual discontent than to fight with her. "Aren't you tired of wasting time today?" he asked instead.

"If someone asks me for help, I'm not going to ignore them."

The subtle jab to Guerra's ethics pinched a nerve, and the more time he spent with his partner, the more painful it became. "That shit for bells didn't ask us for anything," Guerra defended. "He just needed someone to clean up his mess." He held his chin a little higher. "That's your problem Cofield. You only hear what you want to hear and can't stand to miss an opportunity to stroke your ego. I bet you go around feeding stray pokemon, thinking how sorry they are, without ever considering how you contribute to the nuisance. Did you ever stop to think that people don't want your help?"

Cofield remained poised and attentive, but her cheeks were hot again. "Everybody needs help once in a while, even if they don't realize it," she said, standing even straighter and taller than before. The damn growlithe.

"Like that homeless scumbag you brought in the other day?" Guerra persisted, determined to bring her down to his level. "He sounded _real_ thankful when the interrogation started. You could hear him screaming all the way from the locker room. I'm surprised they even let him go. I heard he lost the tail we put on him by the second day. Talk about guilty."

"That was a misunderstanding."

"And I'm sure he _completely_ understands," Guerra added. Talking about the homeless nobody was one of the few things that got under Cofield's skin. If he tilted his knife just right, he might be able to draw blood, or better yet, fresh tears. Those were more shaming and might just sweep her right off of the force.

"Why do you care so much about him? I saw you looking for something in every slum and shady corner we passed. Found yourself a new boyfriend have we?"

"He's instrumental to this case."

"He's a suspect."

"He's a victim."

"He's fucking crazy. Haven't you heard him? The guy talks to voices in his head!"

"And who's to say those voices don't have something important to say?"

Guerra paused on that one. "Can you even hear yourself right now?" Her silence said enough. "Damn. You're just as crazy as he is."

Officer Cofield kept her eyes forward and face stern, just like she always did when her mind was made up about something. His cheap jabs and low blows wouldn't affect her anymore, not when her impregnable wall of self-righteous convictions was up. The elevator doors opened with a _ping_. It was about damn time.

A loud pounding rumbled down the hallway. It was too loud and persistent to be anything less than an irate visitor. The two officers looked at one another. The little bellboy was right. Who would have thought?

Guerra and Cofield put their hands to their belts, stepped out into the hallway, and rounded the corner. A man with blocks for shoulders shouted and pounded on one of the condo doors halfway down the hall. His heavy blue jacket and grey wool cap chafed against the color of the velvet rugs and silk walls surrounding him. He wore a bandana over his face and glanced over at them. First, at Cofield. Then, Guerra, and back at Cofield again.

Guerra didn't recognize the wild eyed maniac until the man turned tail and ran down the opposite end of the hallway with a limp so bad, he might as well have had a peg leg. It was Mad Max, Midtown's local schizophrenic and Cofield's new boy toy. For the first time in their entire partnership, Guerra saw Cofield hesitate. This might be his one and only chance to strike first. He threw out a pokeball and a mightyena in a dark blue collar materialized in front of them. Trained to materialize at the ready, the bite pokemon was already in motion before Guerra even shouted the command: "_Bite_!"

Mightyena dashed down the red carpet and launched himself at the intruder. He bit down on the man's arm and dragged him to the floor, shaking and pulling until cotton grew between his teeth. Officer Cofield jumped into action now that fangs were involved and ran down the hallway shouting commands to stop the attack, but a bite pokemon trained to do what it did best wasn't easy to wrestle with, especially with anyone other than its owner.

Cofield pulled out her command whistle and blew a short sharp note loud enough to break Mightyena's concentration. The bite pokemon released his hold and retreated to his owner's side, passing Cofield as she approached. The gutless gutter grunt writhing on the floor pulled the bandana from his face and knitted a string of profanities so tight that they could have tucked the devil to sleep. Cofield knelt down beside him.

"What are you doing here?" she asked while fussing over the shredded bits of his sleeve. If she acted like that after every _take down_, she'd get a shiv to the belly. Guerra strolled up behind her with Mightyena at his side. The _bite_ damage wasn't nearly as extensive as he had hoped. No blood, guts, or bones to make the catch worth retelling in the locker room. That blue jacket was tough . . . and oddly familiar. Cofield shared similar sentiments.

"Is that my scarf?" she unexpectedly asked.

Mad Max held his arm and flexed his fingers to make sure they still worked. "You're a god damn menace, you know that?" he said, shrugging off the officer's worrisome hands. If it wasn't for her, Mightyena would have ripped his arm out of its socket, and what was worse, Cofield let him get away with the action without so much as a scowl. The entire exchange was a disgrace to the badge.

"I could say the same thing about you," Guerra answered as he loomed over the both of them. Mad Max didn't miss a beat.

"Kiss my ass," he automatically replied. The venom in his words was potent enough to stir Mightyena into a snarl. To no surprise, Max curled back his lip and returned the favor.

"Outa the way, Cofield," Guerra snapped as he reached through her and lifted the hopeless pile of stink to its feet. "Get up. You're coming with us."

"You can't arrest me," Max contested. "I haven't done anything!" He shrugged off Guerra's touch, and unlike Cofield, Guerra was waiting for an excuse to escalate the matter. He threw Max into the wall and pressed against his back to keep him from squirming.

"Running from the police makes you guilty of something, and as far as I can see, now you're resisting arrest."

"Easy Guerra!" Cofield shouted.

Guerra ignored her. With a known rebellious nuisance in his hands and Mightyena nipping to get in on the action, he wasn't going to relinquish a fraction of his authority, especially not to a smart mouthed rookie.

"Guerra," she said again, this time without the surprised look on her face.

"What?" he barked after opening his handcuff pouch. "He's the guy you were so adamant about catching. You want me to let him go because he's your new BFF? What about all that dribble about justice you're always spewing?"

Mad Max turned his head to look at Cofield and the look he gave her was enough to stun.

"Well?" Guerra pressed. Caught within the snares of her own morality, Officer Cofield said nothing. It was a silence Guerra had waited his whole partnership to hear. "That's what I thought."

Guerra peeled Mad Max from the wall and walked down the hall towards the elevators. Officer Cofield stopped, clenched her fists, and fell quietly in line behind them. Guerra grinned to himself. It felt good to be in the lead again with a collar in his hand and a rookie dutifully following behind him: silent, submissive, and in her rightful place. They passed the doorway to the condo that started it all, Suite 542. It was still as solid and unyielding as it was before despite Mad Max's best efforts to tear it down. Guerra was sure to let his prisoner see it as they whisked by.

This las minute call turned out to be more exciting than anticipated. Cofield got the reality check she needed. The bellman owed him a favor and one of the most notorious annoyances in the city was off of the streets, at least, for a little while. Being a repeat offender, Mad Max might even go to jail this time. What would Cofield think about that? Guerra glanced back to propose the question, only to find that his partner had fallen out of line again. She stood in front of Suite 542, staring at the door with a curious yet suspicious look on her face.

Shit.

"What're you doing now?" he asked, although, at this point, Guerra was sure he would never understand what she did or why. "We got our guy. Why ruin someone else's day? Clearly, they're not home or don't want to be bothered."

Officer Cofield kept her eyes on the door and shifted one hand onto her utility belt. "I thought I heard scratching," she said while attempting to use that x-ray vision again.

"You've got hair in your ears. Hurry up, let's go," he ordered, but the leash he had on her melted like warm putty between his fingers the harder he tried to pull it.

Officer Cofield stepped closer to the door and turned slightly sideways against the frame in a cautious assessment of the situation. "Do you smell that?" she asked.

"Yeah, it's the wafting fragrance of our ripe little friend here, so get away from there." She wouldn't ruin this collar for him. Not today.

Officer Cofield unhooked the one and only pokeball from her belt. Duke, the poochyena, materialized at her feet seconds later. He glanced up at his trainer for orders and she gestured a command using one hand and two fingers. It was a skill most officers were too lazy to maintain outside of the required courses at the academy. The sign language was only used in Special Team's stealth operations. Cofield's new uniform must have spurred a few too many fantasies in her head.

Duke went to work at the command and sniffed along the bottom of the door. Guerra bristled. His authority would not be thwarted by a rookie's flawless execution of special skills. She wasn't the only one who remembered how and when to utilize the hand signs. Guerra waved at Mightyena to stay and watch the captured criminal while he reeled in his partner, but the bite pokemon followed him anyway. Guerra gestured again, this time, more forcibly. Mightyena dropped his ears and glanced back and forth, confused by the subtle then overly exaggerated commands. Guerra could've kicked the mutt in its prized teeth. He groaned and dragged both dogs down the hallway to where his partner was standing.

"Cofield! I'm gonna kill you," he said as he stormed up beside her. "What the hell is it now?"

Something suddenly hit the door hard and fast from inside the suite and the entire wall rattled. Guerra and Max jumped back into the wall behind them. Mightyena and Duke flinched into a fit of growling and barking. Officer Cofield pulled out a weapon, held it at eye level, and aimed it at the door. It came from an old brown leather holster hidden at the eve of her back. Guerra had never seen a gun outside of the police museum before. Maybe in ceremonies and funerals, but never in the petite hands of a pale faced rookie. The cold hard steel crafted solely for killing looked too heavy for her conscience to bear.

"Where the hell did you get that?" Guerra asked. And where could he get one?

Breaking eye contact with the door, Officer Cofield quickly realized her mistake and holstered the weapon. "Sergeant Lipton gave me special permission to carry one," she explained.

Special permission, special weapons, special body armor, it was time to put all of that favoritism to good use. "Well, are you just going to stand there?" Guerra prompted, flicking his eyes to the door. This was the push he'd been waiting for, "or are you going to investigate whatever the hell that was?"

Officer Cofield glanced back at the door to Suite 542. It was silent, and the longer it remained so, the larger and closer the possible danger became. She swallowed a lump of doubt down her throat and slowly approached the door one more. Duke cried out behind her, an obvious warning to all of them not to go in, but Cofield only ever heard what she wanted to hear. She looked back at her pokemon partner and smiled. Another gesture, this one smaller and more inviting, set Duke at her heels again. He bent down at the ready, ignoring the weight of his puppy fat as it brushed the carpet underneath him. No light came from underneath the doorway. There were no more startling sounds from within. Officer Cofield reached up to the doorknob.

"Don't," Mad Max suddenly whispered, startling the shit out of the training officer next to him. Guerra quickly pushed him against the wall again, but it wasn't enough to keep him quiet. "There's something in there."

"Don't you mean someone?" Guerra corrected. People lived in buildings, not ghosts, and he wouldn't be convinced otherwise. Max and Cofield both looked at the training officer, then at one another. They exchanged the same silent realization and it left Max bone white and Cofield more determined than ever to go in.

"Wait," Max hoarsely whispered. This time, it was Mightyena's growl that kept him in place.

Officer Cofield quietly held a finger to her lips and turned the doorknob. It was unlocked. It could have been dislodged from Max's beatings or broken from the strike from within, either way, there was no backing out now. A wedge of black grew from the frame as Cofield pushed the door open. The darkness was heavy, empty, and incredibly suspicious for a condo that was supposed to be occupied. Cofield paused. Could it be that she was afraid of the dark?

What a baby.

Officer Cofield looked down at Duke, made another motion, and nodded. They were going in. Not fearless, but courageous. It made Guerra sick. Mad Max might have felt the same, but it was impossible to understand the bits and pieces of words that came out of his mouth. Officer Cofield unhooked the projectile stun gun from her belt and clicked on the built in flashlight. Gun powder and lead wouldn't help her find her way through the dark. Shame.

The hallway quieted again. The moment of penetration had come. "MPD," Officer Cofield announced, shinning her flashlight into the crevice. The light only darkened the shadows around it. They all waited for a reply, and when there was none, Cofield pushed the door open wider so that she could go inside. Duke stayed tight at her heel, ears high, fur bristled, and teeth at the ready. Mightyena perked and attempted to follow the pack but Guerra quickly waved him back with a sharp motion. He wouldn't be left alone.

"MPD," Cofield announced again. "Is anybody home?" The silence only thickened in the darkness. "MPD! I have a canine. We're coming in!"

Officer Cofield and her poochyena slowly inched into the room, turned into the foyer, and disappeared into the darkness. Guerra relaxed a little now that his partner's tension was no longer palpable.

"She'll be alright," he told himself. This would be a good teaching moment for her. All this stress and tension over something that was probably nothing. Maybe she'd think twice before accepting random complaints from the public. Strange noises were common in shared living spaces. It wouldn't be the first or the last time a pet pokemon _tackled_ a door because there were strangers on the other side. False alarms like this happened all of the time. Cofield would be fine, especially in that body armor. She wouldn't even feel a _tackle_ unless it hit her in the face and her pinhead already made a small target. Guerra came away from the wall with one hand on his hip and the other on his prisoner.

Mad Max obediently held his ground, probably because he was too busy muttering softly to himself to pay attention to what was going on in the real world around him. That's right. He had the perpetrator in question. The bad guy was already in custody. Guerra had nothing to worry about. His partner would return in a few minutes after clearing the apartment. She'd be all red faced and down trodden for failing to fulfill her expectations once again. Guerra looked into the dark slice of room. He couldn't see anything but he could smell something. The strange odor from before had gotten stronger. Mightyena cried and shifted uneasily on his paws.

"Are you going to let her go in there by herself?" Mad Max suddenly asked. Was he having a rare moment of clarity?

"Someone's gotta make sure you don't try to run away again," Guerra answered.

"Aren't cops supposed to work in pairs or something?"

"Mind your own business. She can take care of it."

"Really? _Her_?"

He had a point. "Shut up," Guerra snapped. He watched the door again and didn't hear anything. That was a good thing, right?

Mad Max stepped towards the door and Guerra quickly yanked him back. "Where do you think you're going?" he asked. He looked around the hallway. Where the hell was their back up? Probably drinking coffee by the front door and getting an earful from the bellman waiting for this false alarm to be over. Mightyena perked again. His ears flattened and a low growl rose from the belly of his predatory instinct. He shifted into a position that signaled potential danger ahead.

Mad Max's instinct was right. There was _something_ in that room and it wasn't your friendly neighborhood pokemon trainer.

"Fine," Guerra suddenly said, "but if I'm going in, you're coming with me." He repositioned his captive to stand in front of him. Mad Max would make a nice shield if anything unexpected popped out. The two shuffled toward the door with Mightyena watching their backs. Sweat rolled down the side of Guerra's face.

What was he getting so nervous about? It was just an apartment. This door didn't lead to another dimension. There was nothing waiting for him in the darkness except a snot nosed rookie and her pudgy pokemon. There was nothing to be afraid of.

Nothing at all.


	12. Chapter 12

**Chapter 12**

"_He loves me_," the darkness thought. "_He loves me not_."

But was it a question or a statement?

"_He loves me."_

_"__He loves me not_."

"_He's coming_!" the shadows interrupted. The great black Pantherian flicked an ear to dismiss the whisper. She did not wish to be disturbed during such an important reflection, but the voices were persistent.

"_He's coming!"_ they said again._ "He's here_!"

A loud pounding of flesh on wood broke the quiet focus of the cat's deliberations. She stopped licking the flower petals trapped between her front paws and listened.

"Open up, you bastard!" a voice from the other side demanded. "I know you're in there!" The shadows swirled away as the great black cat lifted her head. "Open the door or I'll break it down!"

Pantera stood up from the floor and revealed the cold pale face of the corpse underneath her. White ribbons of flesh blossomed from the dead man's throat. Their original red color faded after she had licked all of the blood clean.

"You did this!" the voice continued. "This is all your fault!" Pantera flicked her tail, clearing the rush of excitement and doubt from her system all at once. Was it true? Was it really _him_? "You did this to me, you shitty Ace! Now, I'm here to return the favor. You wanted me dead, but I'm gonna kill you first!"

Pantera flexed her paws and softened the rigor mortis beneath her. It _was_ him. The one who called himself, Zach. The one she had been waiting for in the darkness all this time. He came. He finally came!

"_He loves me!"_

But the pounding suddenly stopped. Growling, shouting, and cursing took its place. There were sounds of a scuffle, maybe even a fight, but it deescalated quickly and then, there was silence. Did Zach change his mind? Did he leave without saying goodbye?

Pantera had to make sure. She couldn't play with fickle emotions forever. The cat stepped off of the dead ace and padded through the open style kitchen of the apartment condo. Even in the dark of the blackout curtains and waning twilight, she avoided the stream of blood and piss trickling from the body as easily as if she floated on top of it. The great black shadow passed in front of the bedroom door, interrupting the glare of another white corpse. Unlike the body in the kitchen, this one belonged to a woman that smelled like cigarettes and sex. Her head hung upside down over the edge of the bed. Her eyes were glassy and her mouth lay agape in a silent scream. Pantera didn't hear it as she slid past. She could only hear the pounding on the front door.

Darkness met darkness as Pantera stopped in front of the door and stared up at its unwavering black face. It was as solid and imposing as she was. Strange voices drifted in from the other side.

"_He's come_," she told herself.

"_I knew he would_!"

"_But where'd he go?"_

"_Why would he leave?_ _This is what he wanted_."

"_But what if he doesn't like it?"_

_"__Of course he will."_

_"__Of course he won't."_

Pantera hated herself for pouncing ahead. This was supposed to be Zach's kill. He was the one who started the hunt for the ace that had left him crippled and disgraced. But while he was still stalking and watching from the alley outside, deliberating his method of attack, she had jumped ahead and made the kill in his stead.

_"__You stupid rotten vile sack of worthless paws. You stole it." _

_"__How could you?"_

_"__Why wouldn't you?"_

_"__We're friends after all."_

_"__He loves me."_

_"__He loves me not."_

Pantera rubbed her head and shoulders back and forth across the door. Of course Zach would be happy. This was what he wanted. A dead Ace. He would be proud of her for what she had done. After all, it was her fangs and claws that had granted his deepest desire. Pantera rubbed her chin against the door frame to mark her scent. Nobody else understood him like she did. She was the one who heard the pangs of his heart.

"_Kill him,"_ they said. "_Rip him. Tear him."_

The great black cat jumped up and scratched at the face of the door. She wanted out of this darkness. To be with him and present her gifts. Someone approached the door from the other side and Pantera stopped scratching to listen. She never would've heard the soft rustle of cautious steps if she wasn't so well versed in the art of stealth. Was it him? Was it Zach? Pantera dropped to all four paws and sniffed the bottom of the door. It smelt like cooper and rainwater. She knew that smell. It was _her_. The one Zach called, "Baby". Pantera rammed her shoulder into the door, teeth bared and hair bristled.

"_Who is it_?" the voice on the other side suddenly demanded. "_Is that you?"_

It was Zach, but his voice didn't come through the door like before. It came directly to her through a connection that bypassed the laws of human and pokemon. Pantera lifted her head with tears shinning in her black eyes. She had knocked against the portal of his soul and he had answered. From the first time she saw Zach in that rain drenched alley, she knew he was the one. He was her soulmate.

Her _Saudade._

Someone approached the door again, and this time, the doorknob jingled with a touch as soft as the feet on the carpet.

_"__He's coming! He's coming!"_

_"__Places everyone!"_

Having memorized the veins of darkness throughout the condo, Pantera bounded away from the door and weaved back into the kitchen where she jumped upon her throne of flesh and bone. She sharpened her claws in anticipation down the corpse's spine. The front door clicked and slowly creaked open.

_"__Welcome home!"_ she cried.

"MPD," came Baby's voice down the hall. Pantera froze, her claws still stuck in the dead man's clothes. "MPD, I have a canine!"

The cat lashed her tail back and forth and squeezed the body beneath her. It was all she could do to hold herself back. This encounter would not be like the others. Baby would not come between her and Zach again. Not this time.

The front door cracked open a little further and a dim sliver of light too weak to reach the walls of the foyer melted into the darkness. A second light blinked hesitantly into the void. It was narrow but strong enough to establish a navigable framework of the entrance. Pantera crouched down lower to her kill.

_"__I can hear you,"_ she whispered.

_"__I can taste you."_

Baby slowly crept around the door with a weapon held high in her hand and her heart just as high in her throat. Pantera heard it pounding all the way from across the condo, especially when she closed her eyes and focused. For a human, Baby did well to control her fear, but the fur ball of a pokemon at her feet trembled so hard that his claws rattled against the floor even when he stood still. Poochyena were pathetically fragile in the dark for a nocturnal type.

He worriedly glanced around the floor of the foyer for any signs of life. It was a fruitless effort, simply because there wasn't much life left to find in the condo. Plus, his eyesight wasn't nearly as good as hers and never would be. Neither would his nose, especially during his first encounter with death.

_"__I can smell you," _Pantera boasted.

_"__I can cut you."_

Baby touched her arm to her nose, but quickly put both hands around her weapon again. She knew death was in the room and yet her breathing was steady and her foot placement was precise. This wasn't her first time dealing with the stink of rotting flesh. How interesting. With eyes as level as her weapon, Baby advanced deeper into the room. She was a natural born stalker. Black looked good on her, but was she truly a predator at heart?

Baby's light bounced off of the mirror hanging in the hallway and swung into the bedroom where the dead woman lay. It paused, trembled slightly, and quickly flashed back into the hallway with quickening speed. The beam passed over the breaker box. Then, the wires that had been pulled from it. Baby moved forward and discovered a hole in the screen door leading out onto the balcony. Scaling the vertical high rise had proven difficult even for a Pantherian, but the old brownstone building next to it had surprisingly good footholds. One leap was more than enough for Pantera to clear the space between the buildings and land where she needed to.

Baby turned into the kitchen.

_"__I see you,"_ Pantera sang.

The flashlight swept over the cat, whitening her snarl as she launched herself at the officer. Startled, Baby jumped and triggered the taser in her hand. Hours of relentless training kept her aim straight and true, but Pantera was already airborne when the metal prongs stabbed into her shoulder and flooded her nerves with electricity. They collided but Pantera wasn't able to keep her grip on the human while being shocked. Baby spun as the cat barreled into her shoulder and bounced off of the corner of the entryway. She landed on her stomach facing the kitchen while Pantera clipped the wall and spun off down the hallway. Shattered pieces of modeling flew across the room and the sudden distance ripped the metal prongs out of place. The cat's muscles, now softened with the heat of adrenaline and endorphins, bounced back into motion before Pantera's paws even slid to a halt.

Baby crawled up onto her elbows and the Pantherian jumped on her back to flatten her against the floor again. Surprisingly, nothing cracked under pressure. Not Baby's ribs or her voice. Pantera clamped down on the back of the human's neck, but this too kept its shape. Something hard and smooth plated Baby's neck like the armor of an aggron. Since when did humans have shells?

Pantera lifted her mouthful of metal off of the ground to readjust her grip. A bite meant for squeezing, not piercing, might do the trick. Without the suffocating pressure of an obsidian obelisk weighing her down, Baby reached over her shoulder and blindly grabbed at the cat's face. Pantera winked an eye against the probing fingers. At this rate, she'd have to pin it down if she wanted to get anything done without losing a whisker.

Baby's other hand wasn't so obviously annoying. The officer pulled out a curved knife from a pocket in her chest and swung it up as fast as she could. The blade bit into Pantera's neck and the cat snarled through her teeth, moistening Baby's skin with her breath. Pantera bit down even harder but the shear bulk of her muscle drove the blade deeper into her body when it flexed. This human had claws and sharp ones at that.

Pantera spat out the nuisance and Baby hit the ground harder than a dead weight. She bit her cheek and tongue as her chin struck the floor. The knife, wet with blood, slipped from her hand and clattered across the room. Pantera kicked it away before she darted across the beam of the dropped flashlight and disappeared into the dark of the condo. Baby glanced up, grit her blood stained teeth, and staggered to her feet. She tried to steady herself on an end table, but only succeeded in knocking it and the decorations on top of it to the floor. With his trainer finally separated from the beast, Poochyena quickly returned to Baby's side. He bounced wildly off of his front feet and barked as loudly as he could to alert his trainer of the scourge hiding in the shadows. It was all he was good for given he was roughly the size of the cat's head.

Pantera let her lower jaw hang low. The blood running down her neck was hot and required panting to cool it. Silver discs shined in her eyes as she stalked along the outskirts of the light beam. They never once glanced away from the clumsy but resilient human staring back at her. Baby could see her enemy even in the dark. Pantera was beginning to suspect that this woman had leveled up since their last encounter. Humans weren't known to evolve, but maybe Baby was like Zach in that they were different than all the others. Maybe she too was special . . .

"Cofield!" a voice urgently called in the darkness.

Pantera and Baby both glanced to the kitchen entryway as two men hurriedly stumbled into the room. It was Zach and another man Pantera didn't know. Baby called him "Guerra" and he shined his flashlight along the wall. The Pantherian snarled when it grazed her skin. Guerra cursed and Zach wrenched himself free of his captor's grasp, but instead of running to her side like he should've, he ran over to Baby's. He grabbed the officer's biceps from behind and yanked her in front of him.

Was he playing some sort of game? It looked like fun.

But the two men weren't the only males in the room and Pantera wasn't the only beast bathed in black. A mightyena charged into the room from the back of the parade and launched himself at the Pantherian. Few pokemon had such boldness. It was a testament to his training and his foolishness. The two pokemon jumped at one another in the middle of the kitchen and landed on the fallen flashlight, causing it to spin and fill the room with strobing images of paws, legs, fangs, teeth, and claws.

Pantera outclassed the canine in size, weight, and strength, but Mightyena's three inch mane wasn't just for show. It buffeted her swipes and caught her claws like a zubat in a net, forcing her to retract her deadly weapons or risk becoming stuck in his mane. The thick black hair also hid the canine's neck, which made it that much harder to land an accurate hit, especially when his hackles were raised. This enemy wouldn't go down as easily as the others.

Pantera and Mightyena waged war throughout the kitchen, flinging tufts of fur and fury in every direction. They bumped into walls, toppled furniture, and ripped up the floorboards beneath them. Outside of the beam of light, it was impossible to tell who broke free first, but one of the two pokemon tripped and side swiped Baby and Zach off of their feet, forcing Poochyena to retreat across the room. The humans toppled over in a heap and Baby pulled herself free in just enough time to realize that a large black mass was hurtling straight towards her head.

She rolled to the side and away from Zach as four lead paws and a curtain of black silk drew between them. Zach curled into the fetal position as Pantera slid to a stop beside him. She laid down so that both of her front paws were underneath her body. Her tail swept side to side on the ground behind her as she watched the center of the room with the predatory patience of a sphynx.

In the center of the kitchen, Mightyena limped into the dusty beam of light and tripped over the outstretched arm of the dead ace. With one paw hovering off of the ground, he barely caught his balance. A sleeve of blood ran down his misshapen leg, masking the dozens of punctures riddled within. The sleeve matched the swatch of blood blinding his right eye. Mightyena looked up and raised his head just high enough so that Pantera had a clear view of his neck. There was no hiding it this time.

Pantera struck so fast that no one saw her until she darted in front of the light and hit the canine with such force that she picked him up off of his feet and slammed him onto his back. Then, all was silent. The crashing, snarling, and squealing stopped.

Guerra fumbled with his flashlight and aimed it into the kitchen once more. The beam illuminated the Pantherian's back, her foe reduced to nothing more than a dark lump beneath the shadow of her dominance. Baby slowly pushed herself to her feet. Blood trickled from her lip and ran down her neck into her collar, but she didn't dare wipe it away. She didn't want to move any more than she had to and draw the cat's attention. Another quick attack like that could cost her her life in the blink of an eye.

A few feet away, Zach unfurled and propped himself up off of the floor. Pantera's shoulders rolled and the whole room froze in anticipation of her next move. The dark heap beneath her began to spread across the floor. Poochyena quivered as the great black Pantherian raised her head not more than a few inches from his own. The attack on Mightyena had been so fast that he didn't have time to run away before the cat had pounced directly in front of him.

Pantera slowly lifted her head to meet his petrified stare. Silver unblinking crescents rimmed her dark empty pupils. Blood pooled so heavily in her mouth that her bottom jaw hung low, and when she lifted her head high enough, the blood cascaded between her teeth in a thick black sheet. Mightyena's blue collar hung from the side of her mouth. When she ripped through his throat the broken buckle had caught one of her fangs.

The metal tags jingled as the stream of blood trickled to a stop. The collar slipped free from her teeth and clanked dully against the floor. Guerra knew his partner was dead by the sheer size of the blood pool creeping across the floor, but instead of pissing himself again, he groped for the taser on his utility belt. Some shred of loyalty must have tricked the officer into believing revenge was possible, but between sweating hands and panicked shaking, he couldn't get a firm grip on the weapon and it clattered loudly to the floor.

Pantera looked over at him. Then, the weapon. Neither were any real threat to her, but getting stung again didn't sound like much fun. She could kill him now and rid herself of the annoyance or she could play along and let the game continue. Pantera stared at Guerra. This game was too much fun to end now. She bounded away and took cover behind the nearest object. Baby didn't move. She didn't breathe and she didn't look down as the cat circled behind her and rubbed against the back of her legs.

Pantera liked this game. It was like they were playing hide and seek.

Guerra recovered his weapon and aimed it at Baby. The fool couldn't even tell the two apart. Pantera dashed out from her hiding place and struck the officer before he had a chance to pull the trigger. Guerra's reflexes weren't nearly as sharp as Baby's so he fell flat on his back and misfired the weapon. The prongs sparked off of a metal barstool with a crackle of electricity.

The sound spooked the cat, but Pantera already knew that the weapon couldn't be fired again. She bit down on Guerra's arm with a satisfying crunch and kept biting until she couldn't hear the bone snap anymore. Behind them, Baby snapped out something of her own. She extended her baton and charged. Pantera felt the electricity approach and whirled around to stop it, but Baby was faster than she realized. The baton cracked across the top of her head the moment she turned around.

Blue electricity surged down the cat's body, burning the blood on her neck. Pantera kept her head down and blindly hurtled herself into Baby. The officer stumbled but the hit was too high to knock her off of her feet. Determined to tear her down, Pantera leapt for her shoulders. Baby was in the middle of raising her baton again when she caught the attack in the chest and fell backwards to the floor.

She shoved her forearm into the back of Pantera's mouth where the teeth weren't as sharp, dropped her baton, and used her second arm to brace the first. Her body armor pinched with every chomping bite. Her arms shook against the force pressing down from above. It was all Baby could do to hold back the bloody maw trying to rip its way to her throat.

Pantera twisted her head to try and find the angle that could break through the armor, but Baby pushed back just as hard. The cat squeezed her claws into the human's chest, but they couldn't break through the black shell either. She'd have to use her weight to smoother her instead. The reinforced joints of Baby's armor popped and groaned like steel bending just before it collapsed. She couldn't breathe, but her teeth were clenched so hard that air couldn't get through anyway.

It was a stalemate, but it wouldn't last forever.

Both of Baby's arms began to shake and the tremors only grew worse as the cat pushed closer and closer to her face. Baby flinched as several whiskers prodded her cheeks. Hot blood infused saliva dribbled over the bridge of her nose. Pantera increased her point of leverage and Baby's arm dropped down across her throat with the weight of a dumbbell. It was the breaking point not even a hatchling could miss.

Poochyena rushed into the battle and bit into Pantera's back leg. His teeth were sharp with new growth and tickled her tendons and nerves. Pantera quickly pulled up and kicked the pest away. He was weak, but another surprise attack like that in the right spot and she might take some unnecessary damage. There was no need for such a blemish. One more blow and he'd be finished, but just as fast as the Pantherian was to attack, Baby was to defend.

Pantera turned her attention on the canine and Baby wrapped her arms around the cat's legs. Pantera's ankles snapped together and the momentum of her spring, combined with the placement of her paws, threw her off balance. She fell to the side and the unexpected vulnerability spurred her into panic. The cat flailed and kicked Baby in the shoulder, freeing herself from the human's clutches. She then rolled over and retreated into the safety of the darkness to reassess her next attack.

Baby grabbed her shoulder with a wince, but it wasn't dislocated. The reinforced threading of her armor made sure of that. Guerra wasn't so lucky. He writhed on the ground, clutching his mangled arm and screaming into the radio pinned to his shoulder. Poochyena cried in a much weaker manor across the room. Baby crawled over to her pokemon partner's side, and after a quick examination, counted four long gashes across his belly. If it wasn't for the ring of puppy fat around his organs, it was likely he would have been disemboweled. She returned him to his pokeball, and for a moment, his soft red energy coated the room in a dim blood red glow.

In it, Zach and Pantera's eyes found each other. They stared at one another even with the room returned to darkness. Pantera slunk along the wall outside of the flashlight and jumped onto the ace's corpse once more. She laid low in another game of hide and seek.

_"__Can you see me?"_ she asked.

Slowly, Zach turned to look at her, eyes wide and pupils thin like a cat's. He found her, even when he couldn't see. Pantera sharpened her claws in the ace's chest again. She dug her claws so deep into his flesh that they clacked against the bones in his ribcage. It was so delightful a sensation that she squirmed from head to tail.

_"__Did you see? Did you see what I brought you?"_

But Zach wasn't the only one watching. Baby pinpointed the cat's location by the sound of her kneading and slid in front of Zach to obstruct the cat's view of him. Pantera stopped flexing her paws. She wasn't in the mood for any more games. Neither was Baby. With no one but the cat in front of her, Baby slowly reached around her back. Probably to grab another weapon. There was no end to her range of attacks.

Baby brought out the weapon and purposefully held it at her side so that the cat could see it. Pantera flicked her tail but didn't move. She never saw a set of claws like that before, but the way Baby held the weapon told her that it was distinctly different than the others. It was not for show or defense. It was meant for killing.

Just like her.

Pantera worked her claws into the flesh beneath her. She was right. This human was special, but it wouldn't stop the Pantherian from claiming what was rightfully hers.

Nothing would.

Zach's skin prickled. He felt the charge build between the two. He had seconds before Pantera's muscles tightened and Baby shifted her finger onto the trigger of her gun. His heart paused between beats and the tension snapped. Pantera sprang forward, Baby threw up her weapon, and Zach jumped between them.

"Stop!" he screamed.

And she did.

Pantera froze mid-sprint, but Baby only threw her arm up faster. She slung the barrel of her gun off to the side and a gunshot rang out, sharp, loud, and piercing like a lightning strike. The bullet whizzed by Zach's shoulder and nicked the fabric of his jacket before it drove into the drywall across the room. The echo of the shot faded and left them all suspended in silent weightless disbelief. Nobody was dead.

The three combatants stood frozen in a line across the kitchen as if a command whistle had been blown. Baby slowly lowered her firearm as the tension in her body decompressed. Zach stood in front of her with his arm outstretched towards Pantera. It trembled not more than a few inches from the end of the cat's nose.

Pantera looked at the offering: the deep creases in his palm, the short thick fingers, and the grim coated skin. She didn't understand why it hovered in front of her face instead of striking it. That's what every other hand did. That's what the researchers had done since her life began. The tests, the battles, the torture, they all taught her one thing: If you love it, hurt it. Love is pain. And the more pain she endured and inflicted, the happier the humans in the white lab coats were. Pantera wanted to be happy and she wanted her masters to be happy too. They deserved it more than she did, so when she became strong enough,

She killed them.

In the most painful way possible.

So why didn't Zach try to do the same?

_"__He loves me. He loves me not"_

Loud frantic voices suddenly broke the silence as they scratched over the radios pinned to the officers' shoulders. Pantera had been around Baby long enough to know what that meant. Back up was on the way. It was time to make her escape.

Pantera jumped away from the pair, and for a second, Baby thought she was going to attack Guerra again for calling in the cavalry, but the great black cat leapt over the fallen officer, out of the kitchen, through the balcony door, and into the night.

In the blink of an eye, it was over.

Zach fell to his knees, dumbfounded by his ridiculously stupid actions. Why did he jump out into the frontlines like that? He could have died. He should have died, but he didn't. Again. Zach held up his hands and tried to read the lines in his palms. If he looked hard enough, he might be able to decipher the magic he used to save their lives. Stigmata would explain the occurrence of a miracle. Or maybe his hands were just cursed and the worse had yet to come.

Zach looked up at Baby. His eyes begged for an answer, some type of explanation to his madness, but he already knew that there was none. Crazy couldn't be cured. What was he supposed to do now? Baby walked out in front of him after making sure the cat was truly gone and offered her hand. He looked at it: the smoothness of her skin, the slenderness of her fingers, and the tattered black glove and reddening bandages wrapped around her palm. He didn't understand why she didn't use it to arrest him. That's what she was supposed to do in a situation like this. That's what he thought he wanted and what her partner tried to do back in the hallway.

So why didn't she try to do the same?

_"__She loves me. She loves me not."_


	13. Chapter 13

**Chapter 13**

A roaring haze of mist soaked the city in yet another record breaking downpour that was bound to drown a dozen stray pokemon and more than a couple of people. Zach stood in the middle of it, looking up into the boiling clouds above. He couldn't see anything. He never could. Not in the smog of day or the polluted light of night, but that didn't stop him from reaching out his hand like daydreamers were known to do. He wanted to touch the sky, but not to wish upon a star.

Stars didn't exist beyond the high rises of Midtown, but storms did. They thrashed and raged with heat, rain, and lightning. Thunder rolled in from the east and rumbled all the way to the west, roaring and laughing at the frightened screams of the humans lurking below. The growling of heaven was not to be taken lightly. Storms shook the earth with their voices, rattling the world with the power of their words.

They spoke now, so thunderous and heavy that Zach felt like he could reach out and touch them. He wanted to feel the electricity crackle between his fingers. The same way it did when Baby and Pantera came head to head at Ace's apartment. They clashed like two opposing storm fronts yet he jolted them to a stop with a single thrust of his hand. With nothing more than five fingers, he stopped the devil in her tracks.

Zach looked into the back of his hand, winking against the raindrops that fell onto his face. Is this what power felt like? Was this the same feeling trainers had when they defeated a pokemon in battle? Staying alive after an ordeal as monumental as assassination sure felt like a victory. He wondered if Baby felt the same. After all, she was the one who led the charge into the darkness. Perhaps catching criminals and pokemon were one and the same for her. Her badge gave her power, and somehow, that power had transferred into him during the fight. It was as if some of her seemingly boundless energy was buzzing through his veins, trying to find its way back to her.

But did she give that power willingly, or did he steal it from her in the heat of the moment? He was a thief after all. The exchange would've happened the last time they touched and that was when Baby offered him her hand after the battle. He'd been hesitant to accept it, but she snatched his hand out of the air faster than a bolt of lightning. Baby clasped it, hard and strong, and helped him to his feet without a second thought. There were no words, just a smile and a pat on the shoulder.

Zach watched the storm swirl beyond his fingers. He twisted them to match the movement of the clouds. Baby was still an enigma to him. She knew fear like the rest of them. He saw it in the hallway before they breached Ace's door. So why did she feel compelled to run towards danger, not away from it? That's what any sensible self-preserving person would do.

Run.

Zach tried to coax her down a safer path on more than one occasion, but no matter what he said, she wouldn't listen. Not in the streets, at her apartment, or in the midst of danger. She always ran in the opposite direction. How many more times would she save his life at the risk of her own? Nobody cared about what happened to a homeless failure. She shouldn't either. Zach paused in a sudden abrupt thought.

Is that why she let him go? Because he meant nothing to the world or to her?

Zach quickly wiggled a finger in his ear. He knew better than that. The only reason he managed to flee the scene at Ace's apartment before more cops arrived was because Baby passed him over to help her partner into the hallway. For an officer with a broken arm, he sure had a hard time moving his legs. Still, there had to be protocol for situations like that. As a rule loving manual hugging officer of the law, Baby could've restrained him, handcuffed him to a pole, or at the very least, told him to stay put, but she didn't.

Instead, she let him go, because she wasn't just a cop, she was a hero. Not the firefighting adrenaline junkie type, or the entitled flag saluting brand, but an honest to God herculean hero. It all suddenly made sense. Baby's seemingly boundless spirit and tenacity. Her raging positivity and kindness. It was who she was born to be. It was written in the stars and he didn't recognize it at first because he never saw them. Baby saved his life because it was the right thing to do, and she would do it again in a heartbeat, even if that heartbeat happened to be her last.

A hero didn't know how to stop, and at this rate, Zach was going to kill her and she was going to let him. He may have been a thief, but he wasn't a murderer. Not without good reason. He'd put Baby's power to good use. She wasn't the only one who knew how to fight. In order for Zach to settle into this life of misery and disrepute, he had staked his claim to it. He fought and he cheated for every scrap of plastic and rubbish he had. Cops didn't care what one criminal did to another in the blackest hours of the night.

Blue lights didn't come wailing down every darkened alley or behind every gutter grate when things went bad. Thieves took matters into their own hands, and Zach's were covered in blood. None of it was his own. There were some things the rain couldn't wash away, even in a downpour as strong as this. Now, it was time to stake another claim and he might just have to stab Pantera's beating heart to make it.

Zach lowered a steel hard gaze onto the face of Reynold's Power Plant. He stood in front of it, just as silent and imposing as its pitch black windows, broken glass, and pointed spires. Pantera was in there. He could _feel_ her, watching and waiting where she couldn't be seen. It was a sense he'd always attributed to paranoia and unregulated medication, but now, Zach was beginning to think it was something else. He was starting to rethink his entire outlook on this black devil.

Pantera started following Zach the very first day they met, but maybe not for the reasons he initially thought. All of Pantera's victims had something in common and that something was him. It wasn't about the blood lust or Baby. Pantera was trying to prove something. To do something, which didn't surprise Zach in the slightest.

Pokemon had been attracted to him ever since he was a kid. They approached him, often curious, sometimes cautious, but usually with a grudge to bear. Whenever he spoke, they screamed. Whenever he touched them, they flinched. Shocked by some invisible charge. Sometimes, making eye contact was enough to condemn him. More often than not, they attacked without rhyme or reason, and worst of all, they didn't stop until they got their point, or their claws, across.

Maybe this _thing_ with Pantera was similar. He'd drawn the cat's attention on some cosmic unseen level that couldn't be ignored. She had to finish whatever began between them and wouldn't stop until it was over. Zach took a slow heavy breath. He felt the weight of the rain soak through the jacket on his shoulders. His life may have been a soggy dumpster fire, but it was still his life, and if he was going to die, he was going to do it on his terms. Baby's courage in the face of overwhelming adversity must've rubbed off on him.

Zach plodded through the metal and weeds towards the black wedge of an unlocked somewhat misshapen door that led into the plant. The path was easy on his steps. He had familiarized himself with the layout since his last visit with the anticipation of making it his new basecamp. Reynold's was home territory, but once he passed through the portal into the plant, he'd lose whatever meager advantage he had. The shadows were Pantera's domain, and the sun was nowhere in sight.

Where was Baby's torch when he needed it?

Zach stepped into the darkness and blinked out of sight. He waited for his eyes to adjust before walking deeper into the hollow belly of the plant. The shadows slowly weakened and shapes began to take form. The white and red danger signs posted on the walls appeared first, not that it did him any good. His entire existence could be considered a biohazard. After that, the furniture and equipment distinguished themselves from the underlying structure, but there was one shadow that refused to come to light.

"I know you're in here!" Zach shouted. "Show yourself!"

He stood in the middle of a blown out production floor where the shrapnel of the explosion rose up from the ground around him like cypress knees. Their sharp edges cut the thin trickle of light streaming in from the far windows, making the shadows darker and deeper than they should have been. Zach turned in a circle, eyeing the dim gray glow of destruction for any sign of life. Not that grim reapers had any to begin with.

Loyal to her cause, the cat revealed herself. Her manifestation was silent, of course, and began with the points of her whiskers. They glimmered like pale crystals in the weak light. Then the ridge of her brow and muzzle rose above the gravestones like smoke. It was as if she materialized from another realm, one so dark and secret that not even gengar dared to roam there. She stood not far from him, sharp and still like the metal shards around her.

Pantera's body looked colder than the darkness, and when it moved, it was as elusive as a figment of the imagination. Zach knew better than to think as much. The great black Pantherian was real, especially when she stepped forward into the glow of the storm flickering outside and a flash of lightning ringed one of her eyes with silver.

Zach clenched his fists to keep them from trembling. Pantera watched his knuckles turn white and flicked her tail. The tighter he squeezed, the faster it swept back and forth.

Swish. Swish.

Zach tensed in anticipation of another attack and the cat pulled her whiskers back in a growl. He couldn't hide his fear from her. He couldn't hide anything from her. Those two unwavering crescents could see through all of the bravado and bullshit right down to his very soul, Baby's heroics be damned. He was going to die. Right here. Right now.

Pantera rolled her shoulders. It reminded Zach of how she danced on Ace's corpse. It was over. All over.

Finally.

Zach accepted his fate and released his hands. His fingers loosened and hung limply at his sides. Pantera stopped growling and lowered her lips. She watched as he relaxed his shoulders, then did the same. He cocked his head and she slowed her tail to a lazy curl. He leaned back on his heels. She sat down. He stared at her and she stared at him. It was like looking in a mirror. She was a reflection of himself he had never seen. Zach reached up his hand to touch this strange paradox. He wanted to understand it. Maybe then, he could see the cat as she saw him and know why she haunted him so. He wanted cat's eyes ringed with silver.

Did that make him crazy?

That's what the world seemed to think. Psychiatrists told him as much. Therapists broke the news a little more gently, but the teasing chants and judgmental scowls of his schoolyard classmates really sent the message home. Then again, the frightened stares of his parents didn't help and the daily drug cocktails only seemed to make things worse. Nothing helped until Zach struck out on his own. He dropped out of high school a few weeks in and ran away from home soon after. Not because he talked to pokemon, but because pokemon talked to him.

They had a name for it: Socio Schizophrenic Displacement: projecting human personalities onto pokemon because talking to people was just too stressful. They said it was a personality disorder. That the voices were all in his head. But they couldn't hear the voices. They didn't know what it was like. How real it sounded:

"_Are we friends_?"

Zach stepped closer to this so called figment of his imagination. He'd been told by so many people for so long that the voices in his head were his own that he never considered the fact that they might actually belong to the pokemon that projected them. The voice from his dreams was Pantera's. It had to be. Nothing else could be so seductively malevolent. All this time, she'd been calling out to him and he ignored her, just like his parents did to him before he was committed. Zach stopped just a step or two away from the black cat.

What if the doctor's in their white lab coats were wrong: about the voices, about him, about her? What if Pantera wasn't killing for sport, but for a reason, like to protect herself? When one lived on the streets, it was a necessity. What if she was trying to protect someone else? What if she was protecting him? The pokemon trainers she killed beat him. The stray pokemon she disposed of annoyed him. The police she attacked tried to arrest him. Zach's hand began to shake.

God knew how much he wanted it to be true, but the scars of his childhood couldn't be washed away in the rain either. Pokemon and people hurt you. That's what every encounter taught him. He couldn't trust them. Whether on purpose or by accident, physically or mentally, they burned, pricked, bit, poisoned, and tricked. But not Pantera. She had the chance to hurt him back in the alley, but she didn't. She listened when he told her to stop. A pokemon so well controlled could be gentle if she wanted to. She could offer a soft touch. . . Just this once.

Zach carefully turned up his wrist, uncurled his fingers, and offered his hand to the cat as Baby once did for him. Pantera slowly raised her head. She traced the beat of Zach's heart down the veins in his arm and into the nearest nicked fingertip. It pulsated with fear and excitement. The great black cat moved a little closer. Her body slipped in and out of the reflected light of the sheet metal without a sound. She stopped and sniffed his dirty fingernails. They twitched against the heat of her breath.

Zach's heart was pounding so loud that Pantera thought it came from within her own chest. She looked up at him, but Zach looked away, bracing himself for the bite of his nightmares. He refused to come any closer. Everything he had to offer was on the table. Now, it was her turn to show herself.

Pantera flexed her paws and dug her claws into the floor. The tips hooked around the bits and pieces of broken metal, making their edges seem as soft and as warm as charcoal underneath her grip. What would she decide? Pantera flicked her tail again.

Swish. Swish.

The great black Pantherian moved forward, opened her mouth, and stretched out her fangs. Her tongue was just as powerful as the rest of her, so when she licked the tips of Zach's fingers, they bent upwards as if rapped against the door of her soul. Startled by the roughness of her tongue, he quickly pulled his hand away. Zach looked at it and found no wound. In fact, he saw clean skin where the grim had been licked away. It looked tender and soft. So gentle. Zach clutched his hand close to his chest and looked down at Pantera. She sat down again and stared at him with a lazy blink of her eyes.

The devil wasn't going to hurt him.

Zach laughed. He didn't mean to, but he couldn't help it. Everything anyone had ever told him about himself was a lie. They were wrong. They were all wrong: about him, about her, about everything. Zach reached out his hand again, and this time, he didn't ask for permission. Pantera leaned forward and rubbed her head into his palm, purring when the stroke fell just right across her face. The vibrations rolled and rumbled between Zach's fingers like thunder in the clouds and he laughed again. This time, on purpose.

The storm raging across Midtown had finally fallen into the palm of his hand.


	14. Chapter 14

**Chapter 14**

Annie liked the sound of rain. When it was heavy, it roared like an audience's applause, making everything she did grand and awe inspiring. When it was light, the droplets tapped against the brim of her checkered hat like an artist testing out new melodies on a piano. Creative, inquisitive, and gentle. The sound was calming, even inspiring at times, and today, it was the reason she lingered in the shower longer than usual.

The water coming from the showerhead had the rhythm of an April drizzle. When she closed her eyes, she saw the rainbows and wild flowers of spring. The image in her mind was far better than the one laid out before her: white tile sporting a hint of yellow, a rust rimmed drain, and lines of grout that were grey when they were supposed to be white. A cheap plastic curtain tugged across a dull aluminum rail was all that divided Annie from the rest of the women's locker room.

The accommodations were dated at best, but even the orange spotted curtain was enough to catch the steam and create a private sauna. Hot was Annie's preferred temperature. She cranked the dial as far as it would go without burning her skin. She needed something other than pain killers to relax the tension in her body. With more attempts made on her life in the past two weeks than the president's entire first term in office, she couldn't afford to relax her senses more than a hot shower and a moment's peace.

She also couldn't afford to move more than she had to. Annie held one hand flat against the wall in front of her. She couldn't stand on her own anymore. Not when the hot water loosened the tight framework of knots that kept her back skarmory straight the past few days. As much as Annie hated to admit it in her youth, her strength was waning. She bowed her head and watched the water swirl around the drain underneath her. Hoops of hair sleepily draped across her temple. Larger locks slid off of her shoulders with the running water.

Annie put both hands against the wall to raise her shoulders and channel the hot water down her back. It washed away the foamy soap and sweat, revealing the dark discolorations growing deep within her skin. Varying shades of yellow, brown, green, and lavender covered her body in a puzzle work of unformed shapes.

Contusions, the largest the size of a basketball, hugged her tightly from hip to hip. Bright colored hickies peppered the back of her neck. Pantera had one helluva kiss. Not to be outdone, the blood blisters on her forearm fashioned multiple constellations. Other bruises tickled the length of her ribs, exhausting her good humor and white blood cell count all at once. Annie shifted her weight off of one leg. Falling the wrong way one too many times had taken its toll on her knee.

Her whole body throbbed; from her ankles, to her hips, elbows, wrists, muscles, and skin. The slightest touch was more than enough to remind her how painful living could be. Annie closed her eyes. She wanted to hide in the steam a little while longer, but if she didn't move now, she might not be able to later. She'd gotten little rest the past few nights. Back to back catastrophes left little room for recreation, so did nightmares filled with silver fangs and black fur.

Annie turned off the water. The squeaky dial reminded her of Mightyena's squeals before they spilled out across the floor. Pantera's snarl flashed before her eyes again. Annie rubbed away the vision. She kept her head down and listened to the drain gurgle. There was no need to rush. The locker room was quiet. The few other females in the office had already come and gone. She was alone, and thus, had no fear of drawing back the curtain without a towel.

Her body, however, was quick to remind her of its weakened state. She slumped against the wall and remained there until she gathered her strength again. Annie limped over to a nearby bench. Her body groaned as it cooled like wood that popped and splintered when it dried out too fast. Glass filled her veins. It scratched through her muscles with every move she made.

Annie picked up a towel and dabbed the water from her skin. The area around her jawline was still soft with repair and required extra delicacy. She held the towel up to her face. Bruises sleeved her arms. They collared her throat and ran along her chin like a gang banger's tattoo. All she needed now was a teardrop under her eye.

Like that would ever happen.

Annie slowly wurmpled her way into a white cotton shirt and underwear. She tossed the towel back on the bench and noticed a feint orange tint in its folds. Some of the cuts on her palms hadn't completely healed yet. The crevices were still raw and slick with daily use, but at least they weren't running red rivers through her fingers anymore. Annie found a roll of bandages in the first aid kit and wrapped her hands. It took a few tries before she got it right, but she was getting used to the motion; rolling forward and backward like a tyrogue on its way to a fight.

Afterwards, Annie opened her locker. Her uniform was stacked on the top shelf as neat, pressed, and starched as she could make it after a quick round in the washer, a roll in an overheated dryer, and a hard press of an iron that couldn't hold its steam. Annie carefully removed her uniform and laid each piece individually on the bench. She slipped her pants on, teetering lightly when she had to balance on one foot.

Instead of risking a fall, she sat down on the bench and put on her boots. Each lace ended in a triple knot and hoop of equal length. Annie clicked her heels together when she was finished, admiring how each trip and toe tap had scuffed the leather at the top. They were perfectly broken in. She stood up to finish dressing and felt a twinge of pain in her back. The spot above her tailbone still resented her for holstering a hard metal weapon so close to home.

Annie patted it reassuringly.

A standard buckled belt replaced her usual utility belt. Her black uniform and duty weapons were still being processed by forensics. It was likely they were running performance diagnostics. Part of her felt like she had crashed tested the body armor equivalent of a high end race car to test out its safety measures. It wouldn't have been inappropriate to call her a dummy, but somebody had to do it.

Annie moved on to her navy blue shirt. The fabric wasn't as stiff as it used to be so it bent under her will obediently, but it still couldn't stretch like the cotton of her undershirt. Annie winced as she slipped into the sleeves and pulled the shirt over her shoulders. Pantera's kick had left more than a mark. It took a couple minutes of icing for the welt to reduce down to a manageable size.

Annie fastened the buttons on her uniform. She moved from the bottom up because if she was going to start anywhere, it would be there. The bandages on her hands slowed the process but her fingers weaved a tapestry of rehearsed intricacy. She grazed the edges of each brass button with the tenderness of a jewel. Under their shine, Annie forget about the tear in the bottom of her shirt where a fence had tried to drag her down.

Each popped thread magically blended back into the fabric. In the right light, you'd never be able to tell the coffee stain from the pocket on her chest and the rip below her ribs didn't stand out quite as much. She fell on her ass enough times to create a permanent bend in the fabric above her waist, but it only proved her resiliency and determination to get back up again. Used, abused, and appreciated as much as her time at the academy, Annie couldn't have asked for a better uniform. It matched the color of her skin perfectly.

Annie tugged the bottom of her shirt into place, brushed off the front pockets, and smoothed out her collar. She paused to look at her reflection in the tiny mirror hanging inside of her locker. For the first time since she played dress up with her grandfather's uniform as a kid, she felt the weight of the uniform on her shoulders. It comforted her. The tightness of it helped shape her weary body and keep her stuffing from coming out.

Some officers might not have been able to bear the constriction, but the pain was a testament to the hard work she put into every shift. Every day, Annie went home confident that she did everything she could to protect the innocent, track down a killer, and maintain the peace. Pain was a part of life, especially for those who swore an oath to run headlong into the worst parts of somebody's day. That's what it all boiled down to:

Sacrifice.

That's what her father taught her, his father taught him, and what she wanted to leave for others. Annie touched the badge hovering over her heart. Her fingers brushed the small dent in the side where Pantera had collided with her. It was a reminder of the danger, the luck, and the strength it took to be a MPD Officer.

In this uniform, she could do anything.

Annie quickly tied her hair in a braid and put on her matching checkered cap. The brim leaned with her easy smile. She had to look her best. After all, she had an important meeting to prepare for. Annie walked through the locker room towards the exit. She pushed through her limp so that there wasn't a trace of it left by the time she stepped into the hallway. Her body wasn't at full strength, but her spirit was. It had to be.

Annie stopped outside of the women's locker room and looked to her left. Sergeant Lipton leaned against the wall with his arms across his chest. At her appearance, he stood away from the whitewashed concrete and dropped his arms. Maybe she didn't have as much time to prepare as she thought.

"They're here. Are you ready?" he asked, voice tight with restraint. It was the tone he liked to use when screaming wasn't allowed. Annie firmly nodded, hoping to match his control. Lipton promptly turned and started down the hall. Annie quickly fell into step behind him.

"Don't speak more than you have to," he warned, eyes forward on the path blazing ahead. "Tell the truth."

After a few minutes of power walking, Sergeant Lipton abruptly stopped outside of the door to the conference room. Annie hopped backwards to avoid running into him.

"And for God's sake," he added, grabbing the door knob and looking down at her. As hot as his eyes were, they tried not to burn. "Don't be so nervous."

Annie smirked. Lipton nodded.

"I'll be waiting outside." He opened the door to the conference room and Annie stepped inside.

The door rattled in the frame behind her. Annie approached a large oval table. Two special agents from Internal Affairs sat at the very end, as far as they possibly could from the seat closest to her. She wondered if they did that on purpose. They looked like a pair of unembellished book holders with no books between them, and after introductions were made, Annie quickly realized that their personalities were just as empty as the space between them.

They reacted dully to her awkward pleasantries, ignoring her attempts at building rapport as if the words never passed between her lips. They weren't interested in curtesy or casual conversation. They wanted facts. Details. Not just about the incident that left an officer in the hospital, but the ones leading up to it. They wanted to know about Mr. Black, her relationship with him, and why she went to such lengths to help him.

Annie explained both of their positions, but nothing she said seemed to make it onto the wide ruled notepads between them. Some may have started to sweat under such blunt intensity, fidget in their seats during the uncomfortable silence between speaking and scribbling, or stutter at the deeply probing questions into their personal lives, but Annie was sure of what she did and had no regrets doing it.

The truth was what it was. She'd done nothing wrong and the evidence would prove as much. Her statement hadn't changed since she gave it to her colleagues that day on the scene, the investigating officer after the fact, and Sergeant Lipton when he spirited her away from the news media. She had nothing to hide, therefore, there were no discrepancies in her statements, but the same couldn't be said when compared to Guerra's sequence of events.

"He claims you commanded the persian to attack him," one of the agents explained.

"I did no such thing," Anne replied, clasping her hands firmly in her lap to keep her voice level.

"He claims it was familiar with you."

Annie remembered the way the Pantherian rubbed against her legs. It made her shudder even now.

"Familiar. Not friendly," Annie clarified. As if the bruises on her face weren't obvious enough. The questions then shifted to the pokemon in question.

"How do you know so much about persians?"

"Are you a professional pokemon trainer?"

"How many gym badges do you have?"

"Have you worked with the species before?"

"Are you a pokemon researcher?"

"What gave you the authority to lead an investigation into the murders?"

Hours of research, deductive reasoning, and personal experience meant nothing without the recognized accreditation behind it. But Annie was used to the criticism. She tackled each challenge with the same values she was trying to defend. When the interview was finally over, Annie stood up, excused herself, and left the room on her own two feet. The moment she passed the threshold, however, she wavered and leaned against the frame.

Fatigue. That's all it was. Yet Annie couldn't shake the feeling that something was wrong. Not that much had gone right since the first body appeared in Midtown. She tucked the feeling away in her pocket for later and stepped into the hallway. She caught a glimpse of Lieutenant Blanchard rounding the corner. It wasn't normal to see him out and about the station but then again, entertaining Internal Affairs would put anyone on the move. One person in particular took a locomotive's approach to the subject. Sergeant Lipton advanced in her direction.

Annie flattened herself against the wall to avoid being steamrolled. He rushed by without a word but given their last conversation, she knew it was her place to follow him. He was silent, but the screams inside of his head were loud and clear in every other sense. His fists swung mechanically beside him. His eyes glittered with rage. Sergeant Lipton had a temper and Annie had gotten herself into triple digit heat on more than one occasion. She could tell he was upset about something. There was an intensity about him that silenced her own voice. The feeling tucked away in Annie's pocket began rising again and she quickly stuffed it back down.

It wasn't her place to ask about it. Generally, it was far above her paygrade. Then again, officers weren't usually making trips to the ICU either. This was the hottest Annie had ever seen the sergeant, like a flame hardened into a torch. There was no way she could be the sole reason for is ire. It burned toward every member of the Midtown murder task force and their inability to accomplish the single most important task he'd given them.

The night of the attack, Annie hadn't heard such curses from anyone other than Mr. Black, but Lipton was blue in the face when he finished chewing out every officer that responded to the scene. Annie tried to take a more sympathetic approach to the situation. This was Midtown's first serial killer, so it was only natural that other firsts would be made while responding to it. People weren't where they were supposed to be. Attitudes were ill prepared for a worst case scenario.

Mistakes were bound to be made and Lipton couldn't stand it. Slipups reflected poorly on him, the department, and the badge. Annie suspected that he was more disappointed than enraged. So why did his silence feel as deadly as a landmine? Despite whatever he was feeling, Lipton took in account her basic comforts. He brought her to the canteen and purchased a plastic wrapped sandwich and a can of juice for her to drink from the vending machine. They sat together at a small round table. Now that an entire team of elite investigators proved themselves incompetent, he trusted no one but himself to watch over her. He stared at the door while she ate. The last time he was this paranoid was the day her father died . . .

Annie slowly lowered her sandwich. A crumb stuck to her lip. Her frown. She quickly brushed it away with the back of her hand. There was a bright side to this. There had to be, and she would find it just like she found everything else, through investigative technique. Examine the evidence. Find a solution. Talk over the case. There was plenty to talk about, especially to the only other person aside from Mr. Black who understood what language she was speaking.

Annie started from the beginning, although trying to convince Lipton that everything hadn't fallen apart when he was cleaning up the mess was like telling a sudowoodo it wasn't a tree. Still, Sergeant Lipton listened without comment, enduring her derailing statements, speculative assumptions, and ear bleeding tirades, which had grown considerably since their last encounter. Annie's strongest point was that they now had a person directly tied to the Pantherian, and a person, even when dead, left a trail, especially when that person was a famous celebrity ace.

There was a clue buried beneath the bodies and Annie was determined to uncover it. She wouldn't take this discovery nonchalantly. Guerra was in critical condition because of it. Luckily, he was expected to survive. That was more than the three corpses in the condo could say. Annie paused again, still with half an uneaten sandwich in her hand. According to Internal Affairs, Guerra blamed her for the attack, his injury, everything. He was also scared, in pain, and heavily medicated. He wasn't thinking straight.

She couldn't imagine what it looked like when the black persian rubbed against her legs. She couldn't explain why the cat chose to toy with them the way she did, but Guerra couldn't possibly believe that she was capable of commanding such a pokemon. Annie didn't own a single gym badge. Duke was the first pokemon she ever registered under her name. Growing up, she wanted to be a cop, not a pokemon trainer. Sure, Guerra didn't agree with everything she did, but it wasn't uncommon for rookies and training officers to develop different styles. The badge was their common thread and that normally smoothed out all of the rough edges.

Annie quickly stuffed the rest of her sandwich in her mouth. "I hope Guerra is feeling better" she said while chewing. Lipton looked at her with dark obsidian eyes. "Maybe I should-,"

"Cofield," he interrupted.

Annie paused, cheeks still full, a brush of mayonnaise on the front of her shirt. Lipton couldn't help but notice it and the rage within him cooled. It formed a stone in his chest that was so heavy he had to lean over the table to stay upright.

"Cofield," he repeated, this time without the backlash. "I want you to listen to me very carefully." He flicked his eyes over to the window in the wall and an urgency filled his voice. "Tell the truth," he repeated. "And don't say anything more than you have to."

Was Internal Affairs coming back?

"Do you understand?" Lipton asked, although he didn't leave room for an answer. "And forget about that sonofabitch Guerra. Just think about yourself for once."

Mr. Black told her to do the same thing once. Annie chewed around a word, but the sound of loafers scuffing the floor cut her off. A flutter of boots accompanied it. Annie and Lipton looked at the door as three men appeared outside of the breakroom. Annie glanced over her shoulders, just now realizing that no one else was in the room. No one had come or gone during the entire sit down. Detective Morris stepped out from between two uniformed officers.

"Officer Cofield," he said. "I need you to come with me."

Annie looked at Lipton. The sergeant had fallen into volcanic silence. At any moment, he could erupt. With no contest from her superior, Annie had no choice but to obey. She stiffly got up from the plastic chair and followed the detective out of the canteen. She nodded at her fellow officers as she passed. They returned the favor with glances that crippled. Annie touched her stomach, grateful she'd only eaten half a sandwich.

"_One foot in front of the other," _she told herself. "_You can do this. It's probably another briefing._" Only this didn't feel like another briefing. Annie jammed the uncomfortable sensation as far as it would go into both pockets. Morris was the lead detective on the Midtown murders. Getting the story straight from the horsea's mouth was his prerogative. He wanted to take her statement himself. She would've done the same thing.

Annie expected to do the interview in the conference room or the detective's desk, so when they detoured into the interrogation room, she was more than a little surprised. Maybe everywhere else was full? There seemed to be a lot of meetings going on today. Morris instructed her to sit in the metal chair across from him, facing the two way mirror. She clenched the fabric of her pants and peeked over Morris' shoulder at the glass. Anybody could be watching from the other side: Lipton, another detective, a psychologist, a whole class of investigators, the lieutenant, or the commissioner. They could've pulled Guerra from the hospital, or a witness, like the bellman, to point her out of a one woman line up. Morris sat close to the table and leaned over it to block out as much of her view as possible. The interview began, and like Internal Affairs, Morris wasn't interested in her theories about the Pantherian as much as her personal involvement in the whole affair.

His questions had an edge to them, and the longer the interview went on, the sharper they became. It was as if everything Annie said infuriated the detective. Every ounce of reasoning she offered was another insult to his career and his competence, especially when she was right. Morris resented her for everything she did the day Mr. Black demanded her involvement with the case. How could a lowly beat cop best a three star detective? It made her suspicious, unbelievable, and unwanted. The resentment wasn't just palpable. It was contagious, incubating itself even before Pantera ever bared her fangs.

Annie saw it in the glances of the other officers every time she made a collar. She felt it in every cop bar she visited. It was there, stalking her from her first day at the academy, to her first day on the job, until now. This brotherhood of badges wasn't open to any sisters.

Annie didn't want to believe it. Not in this day and age, but that wasn't the only target on her back. Morris made it his personal mission to expose her every flaw, even if it meant diving into divination. He asked questions she couldn't answer.

Why was a homeless nutcase banging on the door of a dead ace's apartment?

Why didn't her story line up with Guerra's?

Why was she playing mankey in the middle every time the Pantherian showed itself?

Just her and the villain in black.

Make that blue.

The more Annie talked, the more she realized she didn't know why things happened the way they did and the shakier her foundations became. She couldn't deny all of the facts flying from Morris' lips, but she could defend herself from his unreasonable accusations.

"You let him go, didn't you?" Morris claimed, his voice growing faster and louder with each word.

"I was trying to help my partner," Annie explained. It was the truth, right?

"How much do you really know about this guy?" Morris pried.

Annie clutched her knee. It ached. She had to be like Lipton. Tell the truth. Don't say more than you have to, but somehow, she felt that it was already too late.

"Did you really think he was completely innocent? Are you so stupid to think he'd never do anything worth questioning?"

The words bit with ferocious resentment, clamping around her throat and making it hard to breathe.

"He's no longer a suspect, but _the_ suspect," Morris continued.

Annie looked down at the table because deep inside, she thought the same thing herself.

"Admit it. You're in league with him? Why?!"

The truth finally came out.

Annie's head shot up. "You think I'm a suspect," she said. "This isn't an interview. It's an interrogation."

"It's about damn time you figured it out."

Discredit her abilities, rob her of her dignity, and strip her of her pride, but Annie refused to relinquish her honor. She sat upright and fitted her hat on her head as if putting it on for the first time.

"I swore an oath to protect and serve," Annie declared. "No matter who or what is behind this shield." She pulled back her shoulders, cloaking herself in blue and white regalia that wouldn't be shrugged off so easily. "I don't turn away anyone who comes to me for help. It's not my place to deem them innocent or guilty and it's not yours either. It's the Law's and I suggest you follow it before forcing a confession out of me or anyone else for a crime they didn't commit."

A rap on the glass from the other side of the mirror ended the match. Morris glanced over his shoulder, then back at Annie. She heard his teeth grinding even after he got up and exited the room. His molars would be as flat as a miltank's by the end of the year. A few moments later, Sergeant Lipton appeared in the doorway wearing a face of polished granite.

"The lieutenant would like to see you," he said.

His tone of voice gave as much away as his expression. The Lieutenant must have watched the interrogation from behind the glass. Her words made an impression. Annie stood up and chanced Lipton a smile. She wanted to show him how proud she was to have the last word, words he'd be caught saying back when he was a uniformed officer working the beat. But when their gazes met, his fiery eyes had turned to ash. The rage inside had burned him from the inside out, leaving nothing more than dust and smoke.

Sergeant Lipton led the way across the station, this time, toward Lieutenant Blanchard's office. He settled into more silence. Annie hated the fact that it took an incident of this magnitude to finally schedule a meeting with the lieutenant, but this was her chance to stop the game of telephone and talk to him face to face about the case.

As they walked, Annie rehearsed what she wanted to say. Clarity and accuracy were invaluable when dealing with the brass. The lieutenant was a busy man. Running a precinct took long hours, hard decisions, and a dedication to the cause that rivaled obsession. He didn't have time for all of her theories and suggestions, only the details that would convince him that what happened was in fact, a breakthrough in the case. This last attack may have taken them all by surprise, but if they banded together, came up with a plan, and outfitted themselves with the right gear, they would be able to, not only find the Midtown Murderer, but capture them, and bring them to justice.

Nobody else had to get hurt. Nobody else had to die.

Annie knew she could convince the lieutenant of the truth. She practiced with the others enough to know exactly what sort of information he was looking for. This would be the most important speech she'd give her entire career. It was her last chance to explain herself. Sergeant Lipton and Annie walked into the lieutenant's office.

"You're suspended," Blanchard said.

A few loose strands of hair fell free from Annie's checkered hat.

"What?"

"You're off the case."

Blanchard's office, filled with its plaques, awards, file folders, and photographs was suddenly suffocatingly small.

"Turn in your badge."

Lieutenant Blanchard punctuated the command with a motion of his arm at the desk.

They didn't believe her. Not one single bit.

Annie's jaw dropped, pulling her head down to look at the gold badge pinned over her heart. It gleamed softly in the warm light of the desk lamp, basking in the centuries of mystery and crime that founded the 336 precinct. Her badge number, engraved in royal blue, couldn't have soaked in anymore color even if it wanted to. Annie looked up at Lieutenant Blanchard again. His hand remained pointed at the cramped section of the desk where he intended for her to place her badge. He was serious.

"That's a direct order, Officer."

Officer. That's right. He was the lieutenant. Her superior. She had to obey his orders.

Annie slowly reached up and touched her heart. Was this really happening? She looked down at the badge in her hand. She'd just ripped it out of her chest without a scream. The pin left two small holes in her uniform. Her arm slowly drifted down to the desk. The badge grew smaller and heavier the farther it fell from her body.

Annie stopped a few millimeters from the desktop. If she let go now, would she ever see it again? Of course she would. Besides, the lieutenant gave her a direct order. Refusing went against everything she stood for. Annie gently set the gold on the desk. She kept two fingers on it until finally willing herself to let go. The motion felt like the empty space between friends after a hug on the eve of a long departure.

Annie quickly pulled her hands behind her back and held them at attention. She didn't know what else to do with them. Lieutenant Blanchard snatched up the badge, opened the drawer to his desk, and tossed it inside. Annie's chest tightened as he slammed it shut. Everything she intended to say, the words she rehearsed so calculatingly, dried up faster than charcoal in her mouth. Like ash.

Lieutenant Blanchard picked up his pen and began addressing the mountain of paperwork on his desk. Most of it, she herself had generated. It was the perfect excuse not to look at her.

"Go home, Officer," Lieutenant Blanchard said. "We'll be in touch."

With that, Blanchard wrote her off with a scratch of his pen.

Annie stood in front of the desk for a few more seconds. She wanted to speak, but couldn't. He hadn't let her utter more than a stutter anyway. Apparently, she'd said enough already. The decision was final. There was nothing she could do about it. Annie stiffly tipped her head and turned around. Sergeant Lipton stood behind her. He raised his eyes, but not his head to look at her. Again, more silence. That awful sound.

Sergeant Lipton knew all along that this would happen. He knew and said nothing. Did he help make the decision? Had the order come down all the way from the commissioner? "_No_," Annie quickly reminded herself. This was just protocol. That was all. Annie looked down at her feet. Pins and needles ran through her legs, but at least the blood started flowing again.

One foot in front of the other.

Annie stepped toward the door, powering through the pain. "_Endure this trial as you've done all the others,_" she told herself. She did what she thought was right, and if this was the consequence, then so be it. A Midtown police officer didn't quiver and quake. Neither would she, as naked as she was.

Annie quietly moved past Lipton. He shifted his gaze onto Blanchard, but the lieutenant didn't return the favor. One lick of the thumb and he turned the page on them both. Lipton glanced away and followed Annie out of the door, closing it behind them. She was a couple of paces ahead of him by the time he finally called out to her.

"Officer Cofield," he said.

Annie stopped, but this time, she didn't turn around. Her chin stayed up. Her shoulders remained squared because, like he said, she was an officer of the law and that was all that mattered.

"Your uniform."

A slow weight, invisible and unyielding, like gravity, folded Annie inward. It was the slightest of motions, one that could have been mistaken for a shift of clothing or a breath. She pressed her lips together. This was just protocol. If she wasn't wearing her badge, she couldn't exactly walk the streets in her uniform.

People might get the wrong impression.

Annie slowly spun around as precise and perfect as a hitmontop. Lipton motioned down the hall in the direction of the public bathroom. Not the women's locker room. He already had her personal effects in hand. They were stored in a plastic evidence bag. Blanchard had been waiting to get rid of them. Annie silently marched forward, took the bag, and walked down the hall to the bathroom. This time, Lipton followed her down the hall, his duty no longer to lead but to follow. This entire time, he meant to keep an eye on her. To escort her out of the building, not to keep her company.

Annie respected his responsibility. His silence. Conversation meant little to one no longer allowed to speak. What were words to the deaf and dumb? In the silence, everything was just what it was. It was better this way. She didn't have to stumble through anymore babble like in the breakroom. He probably thought her a fool for thinking she was still an integral part of the investigation. A dummy.

Annie went into the bathroom and undressed. She came out wearing a set of faded blue jeans, a T-shirt, and a sweater. She didn't remember putting them on. Lipton stuffed her neatly folded uniform into the same evidence bag she just emptied. And then, Annie stood on the stoop of the front entrance, looking down at the first marble step. She couldn't remember how she got there either.

Sergeant Lipton remained in the doorway behind her. He wouldn't leave until she did. Annie waited on the edge of the cliff. She wasn't trying to be defiant, but there was something holding her back. Something she'd risk what little of her job she had left. Annie looked over her shoulder at the sergeant.

"Will you keep an eye on Duke for me?" she asked.

"I'll make sure he makes a full recovery," he replied.

It was neither committed nor compassionate to her cause but it was something. Anything was better than that terrible silence. Sergeant Lipton was strict and apathetic at times, but he treated the department's pokemon as he did everything else, with efficiency and logic. He wouldn't do anything to jeopardize the health and safety of his officers, pokemon or person. Whether it was an incompatible pairing or putting them back on the beat when they weren't ready.

Duke would be just fine without her.

Annie mashed her lips together and offered him another smile. There was no need to speak anymore. She tapped down the steps and hit the sidewalk with the rest of the common crowd.

"Annie," Sergeant Lipton suddenly called.

Her heart fluttered as she whirled around. Lipton stepped out of the doorway and looked down at her from the top of the stairs. The tiniest of fractures in his stone cold visage.

"Your umbrella."

Annie looked down at her hand. There was an umbrella in it. She looked up, surprised to find that the sky was shedding tears on her face. It was raining and her clothes were getting soaked. She never even realized. Annie quickly fumbled with her umbrella and raised the brightly colored canopy over her head. The pitter patter of rain grew louder underneath it, blocking out the hustle and bustle of the street. She couldn't see the sergeant or the station beyond the rainbow.

It made walking away without looking back that much easier.


	15. Chapter 15

**Chapter 15**

Annie wadded in a puddle as she waited for the train to arrive at the platform, unsure if she was too late or too early for boarding. Not that it mattered. She didn't have to worry about punching in or out of anything except the gym anymore. That's what happened when you were suspended.

Annie's body was numb. She felt nothing. Not the jostling of the train when it picked her up or the brush of passengers when they scooted by. She merely sat and watched her umbrella make a small puddle on the floor. She should feel something, but her heart couldn't figure out what. It was standing still, like Lipton in Blanchard's office. Silent. Unwilling to lean one way or another.

With no emotional clues to muddle through, Annie attempted to rationalize her feelings and pick the one that suited her best. If she wanted to, she could be angry. The people she worked with everyday thought she was a criminal, even when she was innocent.

Innocent until proven guilty.

Should she really be so surprised that this happened? Law enforcement officials by their very nature were suspicious, and the evidence was starting to show a repeating pattern of coincidences that were no longer serendipitous. Maybe, on some unconscious level, she was relieved to be taken off of the case. The Pantherian was a formidable foe. She knew how to take down a celebrity ace trainer before he had a chance to draw his pokemon. Let some other sad soul deal with the devil.

Would it kill her to take a break? Annie bled enough to earn one. She could be resentful for that same reason. Who were they to steal the purpose and meaning out of all of her sacrifice? And to top it all off, why didn't they put her on paid administrative leave instead of suspension? The more Annie thought about it, the more confused she became. The end of the track felt no different than the beginning. The train pulled away with a hiss of the air brakes, one passenger lighter.

Annie stood underneath the platform at the bottom of the stairs, listening to the rain again. She stared down the block with the nostalgia of a ghost. A few minutes later, Annie walked through the lobby of the brownstone tenements and up the creaking stairs. She stopped outside of the door to her apartment. Rainwater dripped onto the floor at her feet.

The door was left ajar. Damage to the frame kept it from closing. Caution tape lazily crisscrossed the opening. It was more of a Halloween decoration than a warning. Annie ducked under the tape and went inside. It was a reflex from work she didn't think to break. The case was still open which meant her apartment was still a crime scene, and now, she had fresh eyes and a level head to examine it.

Too bad she didn't find anything new. The window was still broken. Jagged pieces of glass clung onto the frame. They glistened in the rain that splattered onto the counter from the outside. More caution tape haphazardly spanned both sides of the broken window. The tail ends fluttered in the draft created by the open door. The radiator in the corner of the room was broken. Its coils had burned out while trying to keep up with the draft. It dropped the temperature in the room about ten degrees.

A similar exhaustion plagued the refrigerator. The lead lined door hung off of its hinges and the little yellow light was dark. Inside, several of the racks were dislodged. A crust of bread and bits of leftover meals spilled out of the base. Something had spoiled. It filled the air with the odd perfume of putrefaction. In the middle of the room, the table was still flipped on its side. White powder had settled over everything, including the broken glass that littered the floor. The sharp edges crunched like a crust of ice over snow as Annie walked over to the table, flipped it upright, and pushed it back into place.

A sharp twinge of pain forced her to reconsider the effort. She paused and leaned against the table. When the pain dulled into a hard ache, she slowly limped over to the chair and sat in it. Massaging her knee made her feel better, because, at least now, she was feeling something. Annie looked around at the destruction again, this time, with her state of body in mind. Cleaning up was going to be harder than she thought, but the challenge was exactly what she needed to reestablish purpose in her life.

She'd start with the easy stuff: sweep up the glass, clean out the fridge, wipe down the furniture. Annie glanced to the side and spotted the articles that had fallen from the dresser. Amidst a field of frosted glass, the wooden box, plastic cup, and triangle shaped case looked oddly out of place. The box was empty and laid on its side with the lid open.

The inheritance that once filled it gone, locked away in the precinct's evidence locker along with the rest of her uniform. Annie limped over and sat down next to it, ignoring the pricks in her legs. She picked up the box, brushed away the white paw print, and rubbed a thumb over the emblem engraved in the lid. The box belonged to her father as did the nearby triangular case with the flag folded inside.

Annie exchanged the box for the case. The flag inside was dislodged and out of frame. She opened the case with a squeak of the hinges. None of the powder had gotten inside. The flag remained untouched since the day it was placed in her hands during her father's funeral. She remembered the commissioner's face that day. It remained hard and unyielding even when the firing squad began and the sound of taps echoed across the cemetery. An officer killed in the line of duty deserved glory, not tears.

Annie touched the soft dark navy blue folds of the flag. White dust trailed behind her fingers. The commissioner and all of the other officers wore white gloves that day. The white powder on her hands didn't seem much different now. Annie removed the flag from the case and unwrapped it, peeling back the layers one by one. The folds opened easily as if waiting to blossom after a long hibernation.

Annie tugged away the final piece. A perfectly cleaned and polished region issued firearm was hidden in the center of the flag. It once belonged to her father and his father before that. A twin to the one still at the station. They said that her great great great grandfather used to wear the two guns holstered around his shoulders, one under each arm, so that if he was ever taken by surprise while on the beat, he'd be able to cover both sides with the right end.

The Cofield's had a long history in law enforcement so it was only natural that Annie followed in their footsteps. The stories her family told were of a bygone era filled with saloons, gun fights, and swill. Her imagination was filled with the swagger and pride of generations of dusty spurs and bullseyes. Annie looked the weapon over, reflecting on its history. She wondered what her father would say if he saw her now. Would he be proud? Ashamed? He could no longer voice his opinions, but her grandfather could.

What would he say when they finally came face to face? They hadn't seen or spoken to each other since she graduated from the academy. Even then, it was from a distance. Always at a distance. She could barely remember the time she sat upon his knee as a child. Grandfather Cofield wasn't exactly the peppermint carrying, porch rocking, corny joke type. He barked when he spoke. His words snapped with wit and criticism fast enough to make you flinch. His expectations and personal evaluations quickened family gatherings to remote courtesies and tasteless small talk during the holidays.

Annie had yet to find a harder head than his, and after his son passed, the stubbornness thickened into callousness. Annie felt its chill from time to time, but she also knew that her grandfather loved her in his own way.

He pushed her to exceed any limit. He supported her rise through the academy. To meet his expectations was to soar above others and the last time they met, his eyes had thawed just a little. The fear of disappointing Grandfather Cofield was real, but he was also the one who told her that it took guts to do this job and anyone that picked procedure over instinct wasn't worth the badge. Annie placed the firearm in the wooden box and folded the flag back into place. She set both on the dresser, followed by her favorite picture of her father in uniform.

The day she could wear hers again couldn't come fast enough.

A cold wind blew in from the window, fluttering the caution tape fast enough to make it snap. Rain flung father into the room. Annie turned around. It was about time she got to work. To stop the outside from coming in, she scrounged around the apartment for ideas. The shower curtain made a great waterproof cover for the window. Her sandals wedged nicely under the door and a metal hanger bent into a wire around the handle made a decent lock. By the time she finished securing the apartment, she managed to change out the linens, shake out the mattress, and set it all up again, before it was time to go to bed.

Bundled in an extra pair of pants, a jacket, gloves, and a hat, Annie crawled under the covers. It was supposed to get cold tonight and the dampness would only make it worse. She tugged the blanket over her head and used a flashlight to make one final list of supplies she would need to fix everything before she forgot. The estimated cost made her feint, and when she woke up again in the morning, she shivered over to the stove and turned it on to warm herself by its coils.

When she felt her fingers again, she used them to wipe up the small splattering of blood on the cabinets where she had smashed her face into the wood. Thus, another round of cleaning began. By the third day of nonstop scrubbing, Annie managed to reconstruct the room into some semblance of what it once was.

That's when the reality of it all sunk in.

There were no more statements to give. No more research to dive into. No more life and death battles. There was nothing left to distract her from the fact that her own precinct thought she was a traitor. Her so called friends stopped texting her. Sergeant Lipton was still radio silent. Every day she checked her mailbox and everyday it was empty. Even the landlord failed to realize she had returned. Otherwise, she would've come shrieking down the hall about the damages.

It was like she was shunned, banished, taboo. In reality, she was suspended. And the lieutenant didn't specify when she would be coming back. The weight of the silence weighed heavily on Annie's aching knee. She felt like a paper boat gliding along the fast flowing swell of a downpour, unaware of the dark drain mouth up ahead. She needed to find a light at the end of the tunnel. Do something to lighten the mood. There was nothing she could do about the suspension but wait.

"Raise your head," Annie told herself. "Keep your chin up."

So she did. She looked up at the overhead cupboard and an idea struck her. Half of a box of cereal and a brand new unopened pouch of poketreats were inside. Little pichu danced across the front. They were cute and inviting. They weren't cheap either. Annie spent more on a single pouch than her daily allotment for dinner. She made sure to read the labels and check the reviews before settling on the brand.

One chew twice a day for two weeks was guaranteed to reduce discharge, stimulate healthy nerve function, and leave electric type pokemon with a coat as sparkly as their sparks. Annie smiled and grabbed the pouch. She put on her boots, grabbed her rain jacket, and hopped out of the door. Cheering herself up may have been impossible, but that didn't mean she couldn't spread a little cheer to others, and who better to share it with than a pair of cheering pokemon?

Luckily, she knew exactly where to find one.


	16. Chapter 16

**Chapter 16**

Immune to most street borne diseases and with hands calloused enough to withstand a needle stick, Zach rummaged through the guts of an overstuffed donation bin. It was filled with unwashed garbage and tattered trash, but he stuck his hands in anyway. Buried treasure wasn't found sitting on the surface after all. Nearby, Pantera lounged in the shadow of an adjacent brick building. The shade of its face paled in comparison to the rich velvet of her coat, but a little darkness was better than nothing. Twilight was a minxy tease for a creature of the night like her.

"Look at this," Zach commented, holding up a piece of black leather equipped with a set of straps that formed a triangle of questionable origin. "I don't even know what the hell this is." He tossed the article over his shoulder. Bits and pieces of business suits followed. At least those had an obvious purpose.

Pantera swatted at the articles that fluttered close to her. The cat hadn't left Zach's side since partnering in the secrecy of Reynolds Power Plant days ago. They ate together, slept together, and scavenged together, even when that meant ripping open bag after bag of pungent oversized hipster jeans. Zach cursed as an avalanche of bad banana peels and other biodegradable sludge suddenly washed over his feet.

"For the love of grimer," he cursed. Not every lavender scented landmine contained stretched out jeggings, ripped undershirts, and holey tennis shoes. Donation bin and dumping ground were synonymous in Midtown. Sorting through the muck was a game of Russian roulette, only instead of blowing your brains out, you blew out the last half of your intestinal tract in a pale faced sweat from some unnamed bacteria.

Zach shook the curdled crud from his boots and used a hand-knitted scarf to wipe up the rest. At least Grandma's stitching was good for something. Pantera laid back and curled the tip of her tail, fully content with watching the deep dive from afar. She already had her fun chasing away the swinub nosing around the area. Donation bins attracted all sorts of beggars, cheapskates, and con artists looking to make some easy coin. Some even tried to base their territories around the hoarding hot spots, but Pantera owned all manner of darkness, inside and out. She disbanded those trash mongers with a flick of her whiskers. Zach had the pleasure of combing the cream of the rotted crop at his leisure, but tonight the whole landfill smelled sour.

"_What are you looking for_?" Pantera asked with a twitch of her ear.

"I'll know it when I see it," Zach replied with his top half stooped over the open hatch of the bin. Some of the best goodies were usually buried away inside. He found a stash of cashmere blouses with perfume still stuck to the threads and a pair of thick Sherpa socks without fleas in them. Both ended up next to the dirty dish rags molding in the corner.

"Hold on a second, I think I found something," Zach mumbled from the depths of the pit. He withdrew from the hatch and pulled out a large trench coat. He held it up by the shoulders and shook it out for better examination. The coat was black. Almost as black as the pigment used to dye it. Two columns of buttons were stitched along the front and not a single one was missing. Every seam was intact and the gold label embroidered at the cuffs and collar tagged the garment as a designer brand. A mark defaced the waistline, but it was small enough to be dismissed by most thrifty spenders.

The inside of the jacket was double lined for added insulation. The outside was waterproofed. Extra swatches were attached to the arms and collar to protect against repetitive wear. One might actually pass as a gentleman while wearing such a coat, no matter the smell underneath. Zach tossed the coat onto the nearest banana peel with a sigh. He wasn't exactly sure why he was disappointed considering he didn't even know what he was looking for.

That's when he saw it. The roselia amongst the gloom. A blue baseball cap poked out from underneath the sleeve of a multicolored zip-up jacket in a small crevice between the bags. Zach quickly snatched it up. He brushed off a layer of lint from the yellow logo embossed on the front. It looked strikingly similar to some type of bird pokemon that belonged to a professional sports team. The person who threw the hat away must not have been a fan because the hat was in perfect condition.

Zach tugged off his wool cap and snapped the new one on from back to front. He found other hats while digging: clip-ons, cowboy wranglers, and bills with better fits, but this one wasn't like the rest. This one matched the color of his jacket perfectly. Satisfied, Zach kicked his way out of the rubbish. Something metallic caught his eye and he paused at the edge of the stinking stacks. A gold wrist watch had tumbled out of a pile during the search.

It glittered against the rough and dirty asphalt. The trinket was probably a token of forced affection from some ritzy woman to her tailored suit wearing boy toy who already had enough accessories to make a snubbull jealous. The watch softly ticked from its spot on the ground. It counted the seconds Zach took to assess its value. A piece like that would fetch some heavy coin at the pawn shop on Divine Street.

Zach bent down and picked up the spheal imprinted bandana beside the watch. He snapped off the dirt, stroked out the creases, and tucked it back into his pocket. Next time, he'd be more careful when climbing through the plastic and polyester jungle. Zach shoved his hands in suite and lumbered down the side street, out of the complex. He didn't bother to look up to see if Pantera followed behind. She always did. One quick trot and the cat pranced up beside him, effortlessly shifting into a walk that matched his own. She didn't have to slow her pace anymore to accommodate his limp, especially when he was in a good mood. It amazed Zach what proper food, sleep, and stimulation could do to one's health.

Partnering with Pantera was the best thing to ever happen to him. Her presence scared away scavengers feathered, furred, and skinned alike, allowing him access to food that wasn't rotten or spoiled and other unmolested resources. And at night, her purr chased away the pesky voices in his head so he could sleep without petty squabbles, complaints, or fits of rage and regret to disturb him. No more headaches during the day either. Zach's mind was peaceful when Pantera was in it.

Together, they navigated the secret corridors that branched across the city. Zach took the lead. After following the cat for days, he learned how to maneuver through tight obstructed spaces without brushing up against anything and was confident in his ability to traverse the concrete planes without disturbing the festering world around him. He also learned how to breathe without making a sound, how to wait, and how to watch until he became all but invisible. Which came in handy when the police liked to punch your ticket every time they saw your face.

Not that learning any of these new skills was easy or enjoyable. Undoing decades of poor posture and lazy habits was painful. Almost as much as the nagging of the world's most perfect apex predator coaching your every step of the way: _Turn your shoulders not your body. Support your weight with your legs not your hands. Twist your neck not your torso. Stop scratching your ears_. The cat was ruthless, but the day Zach chucked a pallet like a Frisbee against some gangbangers looking for a way to pass the time showed them both the fruits of their labor. Pantera didn't have to raise a claw to defend him. Now, Zach understood why trainers liked having pokemon around. They instilled confidence and control into whoever commanded them, even when they weren't fighting. Zach could only imagine the power a partnership years in the making could create. The things they could accomplish . . .

An empty tin can rattled against the concrete. Zach whirled around and spotted a street urchin scurrying around the corner away from them. They'd been spotted. "He's running," Zach announced.

"I'll catch him," the cat reassured.

Pantera bounded after the noisy rattata and disappeared around the corner with a whip of her tail. The street rabble might not recognize Zach sporting a new blue coat and hat, but they would recognize Pantera. Her figure was too striking to forget. They didn't have to know the details of the species to know there was a monetary reward involved in her capture. Both the police department and news media were strobing images of Pantherians across every digital surface known to existence. Zach couldn't take the chance of an eavesdropper turning snitch and alerting the authorities of their location.

The world was ready to crucify the cat for the bodies she left behind. They didn't care why she did it, only the Pulitzer Prize awaiting at the end of the story. Zach would never be able to clear her name under such high stakes. No one would believe that a giant rare breed of pokemon that looked like a demon did what it did because it wanted to protect somebody. A pokemon that killed people was always put down no matter how justified their actions. That was the law.

Hiding the cat was the only way to keep her safe. And if she remained a mystery long enough, her legend would become one like the talking meowth or sewer sharpedo: Believable but complete myth. Fun to talk about, but unreasonable, because that's the way the world worked. All they had to do was stay out of the mainstream channels, public and ill repute alike, and keep moving until the excitement died down. Pantera was already a master of stealth. With his street smarts, she'd learn to overcome the human advantage easily. He'd teach her what security cameras looked like, when drug dealers were likely to appear on seemingly abandoned street corners, which alleys had rooftop peepers, and which windows had old women with nothing better to do than stare down at the street all day long. In the meantime, gossip of a black devil would spread. Fear, imagination, and drunken visions would fuel the myth.

Together, they'd acquire a reputation of dastardly wit and destruction, all while maintaining their anonymity. The streets would know neither his name nor his face, only the legend: The Midtown Murderer. Zach liked the sound of it. They'd be incorporeal. Unbound. He flicked his fingers off of the brim of his hat in salute to the future storm brewing above his head. In anticipation of his success, raindrops began to fall from above. Luckily, he didn't have to worry about water in his eyes now. He didn't have to worry about snitches either, not when Pantera returned a few minutes later, jewel flushed with light.

For a moment, Zach was afraid her fear mongering would draw too much attention, but he didn't hear any screams, and that was always a good thing, so he moved on as quickly as he did the donation bin. The rain started to pick up and the swirling clouds warned of an imminent downpour. Pantera's oil slick fur shed the water faster than the clouds, but her tail swished violently whenever thunder rolled by. Sometimes, she even looked up at the sky and chattered like she was cursing somebody. Zach understood her discomfort given she'd been stung more than once with an electric tickle to the nervous system, but he liked the rain even more now that he could listen to it without worrying about the voices in his head.

The storm had a soothing voice, but the thought of getting utterly drenched wasn't all that appealing now that he had a dry place to go home to. Reynolds Power Plant was surprisingly accommodating when you got past the toxic exterior and explosive facelift. It remained relatively dry inside aside from the giant gaping hole in a quarter of the building. Safety and privacy were assured in the maze work of passages within. Some of the office furniture survived and made a decent bed. The walls were also so high that the smoke of a fire couldn't escape even if it burned all night long.

Aside from the occasional soul startling lightning strike, the plant was a personal paradise. And at this pace, they would make it home without having to strip naked on a clothesline. The rain started to pull the smell of wet poochyena from Zach's jacket. Pantera shifted upwind to avoid it. Zach sniffed the lapel and patted it against his chest. A dog of the streets, always and forever.

Now that the rain settled in, the rest of the trash diggers withdrew into their hovels. Most people had enough sense by now to know a flash flood wasn't far behind the pleasant sprinkle. The storm front crawling its way across the region had stalled over the city like a snorlax in the street and there was no telling when it would move again. Even Zach's new hat wouldn't protect him from the force of that rainy day. If they held their noses and cut through the double dumpsters of the corner restaurant, they'd make it to Reynold's faster, but the path to the right smelled like copper and rain. The true blood of Midtown, so Zach veered off to the right. He wound his way onto a sidewalk and stopped on the edge of a pothole colleting water in the road.

Once upon a time, it used to be his doormat. Zach lifted his head and looked down the graffiti plastered walls of his old alley. He hadn't been back since the night he ran across town to the police station. Wading through these noxious waters never once crossed his mind since then. That part of his life was over. He didn't want to think about the grime he crawled through to get there. But now that it was within view, he couldn't stop thinking about it.

Whispers from ghosts in a field of half eaten corpses beckoned him closer. They drew him in with thoughts he'd been avoiding for days. Was that night truly as terrible as he first thought it was? Was the rain playing tricks on him again? He heard things coming from the alley. Real things. Things that weren't supposed to be coming from an alley that didn't have anything living in it. Pantera looked up at Zach as he stepped a little closer.

He had to take one last look. After that, he could fill this cesspool with mortar and concrete and leave it all behind. Given his last visit, Zach braced himself for the worst decomposition had to offer, but when he turned the corner, the bodies of the pokemon Pantera had delivered to him were gone. Not a trace of their horrible deaths remained. It was like they had vanished. Like they never existed at all. Someone must have finally noticed the stench and cleaned up the massacre before a scandal broke out. The city couldn't handle a pokemon killer and a people killer at the same time. Which was fine by Zach. There wasn't anything worth remembering in that alley anyway. But that didn't mean it was empty.

Zach quickly ducked behind the corner again. A person stood in the rear of the alley with their back to him. They hadn't noticed the intrusion when his footfalls had been as quiet as the rain. Pantera hurriedly trotted up behind Zach. Together, they peeked around the edge of the brick.

"_It's the woman_," Pantera exclaimed. But not just any woman. It was Baby. And she wasn't in uniform. She wore a blue and white rain jacket in preparation of the weather, but the hood wasn't up so the rain frazzled her hair anyway. "_What is she doing_?"

Not much from the looks of it. Baby simply stared at the ground with her hands at her sides. Were the stains of his old life so dark that they couldn't be scrubbed away by the city's public workers? With no semblance of a campsite left, she probably thought he had forsaken her and abandoned Midtown. If that was true, she shouldn't look so dumbfounded. She was the one who let him go after all.

Maybe she thought she'd be fast enough to catch him before it was too late. Dash those 100 yards and stop him like she did all those times before. Baby held something in her left hand. A bag of snacks judging by the little yellow figures on it. It looked full and she hadn't moved since they arrived. Just how long had she been standing there? Her jacket was starting to soak up water despite the waterproofing. The hypocrite. She'd catch her death standing around like that. Baby was always going on about saving this and helping that. She couldn't even take care of herself. Dying from the common cold wouldn't be worth the irony.

"_She never listens_," Pantera suddenly said. She watched Baby without blinking. "_She needs to be taught a lesson._"

Zach looked down at the long black shadow beside him as if it just spontaneously materialized from another dimension. That's exactly what he was about to say, but it didn't sound the same coming from Pantera. It sounded worse. It reminded Zach that this wasn't the first time the three of them met like this before. Their circumstances were different now given all that had happened, but Zach would never forget the fear he felt before coming to understand the nature of the beast.

He remembered how the devil appeared again and again, shattering livelihoods as easily as the glass she leapt through. Pantera wasn't just another stray on the streets. She was a natural born killer, and in the right hands, a weapon of mass destruction. 110 lbs. of black fur, serrated teeth, and hooked claws. She was part of the reason Zach didn't want to remember this alley. She was the reason no one came running at the sound of a rustling bag of treats. Zach slipped one foot behind him and shifted away from the cat. Pantera snapped her attention on him as if he'd taken off running.

"_What is it_?" she asked. The jewel on her head glowed with the quickening beat of his heart. Her pupils expanded, sucking up more of his soul with every millimeter they gained. Zach couldn't shut her out because he had already let her in. Her eyes were black as night when they lashed against Baby's back once more. Pantera whipped her tail back and forth.

"_It's her_," she said. "_It's all her fault. She's the reason you don't want to come back. She's the reason no one is coming back._"

"_That's not what I meant_," Zach said, but the cat wouldn't listen.

"_She doesn't care about you_. _She never did_."

"_You're lying_."

"_She's a killer_.'

"_She couldn't be_."

"_You heard the thunder. She almost struck you with it_!"

"_But she didn't!"_

"_But she will_!"

"_Why?_"

"_Because, she's the police_."

Pantera's voice sounded so much like his own that Zach couldn't tell the two apart anymore. Then, Baby was in his head too, telling him a completely different story. "I thought we were friends," the memory said. Pantera opened her jaws against the intruder. "_Don't listen to her_. _Listen to me_. _I'm the one who loves you_."

"_But_ _she's my friend_."

_"__She's nothing_!"

"_I'm nothing_!"

And the voices held at bay by the devil's charm suddenly flooded back into Zach's consciousness. His voice, her voice, and snippets of conversations past poured out all at once. They filled him with words he didn't understand. Things he said but didn't mean. Things he meant but didn't say. They clawed, screamed, and giggled to the front of this thoughts.

"_Are you insane_?" they said.

"_Open up you bastard_!"

"_We like her. You should walk her home_."

"_It's not safe to be out here by yourself_."

_"__Fine, but only until 5__th__ Avenue."_

"_I can make you something."_

_"__I'm not a murderer!"_

Zach bit his lip, closed his eyes, and drilled his palms into his ears. "_Stop_," he cried, hunching over into himself to block out the voices.

"_You don't need them_," Pantera said, shoving her way to the front.

"_You only need me_."

"Get away from me!" he snarled, throwing his hands down and stomping his foot forward. Pantera flinched backwards into an aluminum trash can from the attack and the lid clattered loudly to the ground. Its ear rattling boom startled the cat and she dashed off into the shadows with a flash of her silver eyes. Zach stood with his shoulders bowed and hands braced, ready to choke the life out of whatever voice dared speak next.

"Who's there?" Baby shouted from within the alley.

Zach froze. He forgot she was still in the alley. It was impossible to hide his presence now, but his back was to her. If he left now, she'd never know who stalked her shadow. He could still make it back to Reynolds in time.

"I know you're there," Baby started again. "Show yourself!" Her meek but determined voice was like the rain. A gentle invitation for the storm to come.

Should he run, for real this time? Zach relaxed his fists. He wouldn't be able to outrace her anyway. He scuffed his feet to make sure he didn't startle the officer in waiting when he appeared around the corner. Baby held one hand behind her back. The other continued to clutch the bag at her side. The last time they saw each other, she'd eaten a mouthful of floor boards. The bruises on her face had morphed into larger darker shapes because of it. She should be at home licking her wounds, not wandering around the streets like a drifter.

"What do you think you're doing?" Zach growled, marching towards her. Baby dropped her arm from her back and weakly raised the hand holding the bag. Zach stopped in front of her. Their slight difference in height now outmatched by his growing sense of responsibility for the bumbling idiot. What sort of poison was she peddling this time? Zach grabbed the bag so that they both held it together. It was a bag of poketreats. Pichu danced on the front like cheerleaders and a vast black hole opened up in Zach's stomach. It consumed everything around it, hollowing him out from head to foot. Zach dropped the bag and Baby held it a little closer to her chest. He looked into her concrete colored eyes. She looked away.

Baby would never find what she was looking for and she knew it. Death and dismay were baked into the bricks of Midtown. She felt it radiating from the ground where the blood had been. On some cosmic level, she knew something terrible had happened here. The unopened bag in her hand was proof that the two cheering pokemon she had hoped to meet weren't going to come to her call no matter how many times she rattled the bag.

Zach didn't have the courage to tell her the truth. Not that he actually knew what happened that night he woke up in hell anyway. What he saw then in fear, what he thought he knew, and what he knew now, muddied the truth. The only thing he knew for certain was that when he left the alley that night, Pantera followed him, and when he came back, Minun and Plusle were dead. If he didn't speculate, it was the same as not knowing, and if he didn't know, he could pretend it never happened.

They could both pretend, but Baby made an awful liar. Her shoulders barely held up her head and her eyes had lost their color. Bright and shiny Baby was stormier on the inside then the skies above. She wasn't here to hand out poketreats. She was lost and had wandered into his alley again trying to find her way home. The collar of her shirt was soaked. Rain streaked down her cheeks and suddenly, Zach couldn't stand the rain any longer. He grabbed the hood of Baby's rain jacket and yanked it over her head. He held her there because staring at the sulfur soaked brick was better than her miserable face. Baby didn't push back and that made it even worse.

"You idiot," Zach muttered, throwing her upright again. Baby tottered back and grabbed the hood of her jacket to keep it from falling off. She wasn't supposed to be miserable like him. She was supposed to be better. She was the hero. They stared at one another until Zach finally whirled around and started out of the alley.

"Come with me," he commanded. "I want to show you something."

The sound of his steps echoed ahead of him. Splash. Pause. Splash. They were the only steps he heard because Baby didn't take the bait. She wasn't going to follow him. Splash. Pause. Splash. Maybe it was better this way. He warned her not to trust strangers like him. That lesson must've finally soaked through that incredibly thick skull of hers.

Splash! Splash! Splash! Baby trotted up behind him. "Where are we going?" she asked.

Zach firmly planted a frown on his face to keep from smiling. "You'll find out soon enough," he said.

Zach led the way out of the alley and into a cluttered breezeway. They squeezed through a couple columns of empty vegetable boxes, tip-toed around a cooking oil spill, and scaled an iron gate to get to the other side. From there, they skittered past congested backstreets and wormed through the clogged and long forgotten arteries of the city. Baby tackled the obstacles without breaking anything, but she snagged enough rusty nails to rip a hole in her pants. Having untangled her more than once, Zach held up the last piece of chain link fence so she could pass under it without tearing her clothes off.

Baby slipped under, stopped on the inside of the property and looked up with a hand to her hood. "Reynolds?" she observed. "But you said we shouldn't go in there."

"No," Zach corrected with only a smidgen of hypocrisy. He dropped the fence and trudged on ahead. "I said you'd have to be insane." He kicked down the weeds, shoved a door open with his shoulder, and disappeared into the black depths of Reynolds Power Plant. When the pitter patter of little feet didn't follow, he stuck his head out of the door again.

"What are you waiting for?" he asked. Baby ran her hands back and forth along the zipper of the pouch. Her toes drifted together.

"Don't tell me you're afraid of the dark?" Zach teased. Baby puffed up faster than a jigglypuff, but her eyes darted to the jagged lines of glass hanging in the windows. They looked exactly like the ones in her kitchen. Zach positioned himself outside of the door and sighed. "You've already come this far," he said. "Why stop now?"

Baby's torch might have dwindled to the size of a charmander's tail in the rain, but that was more than enough to light one's way in the dark, especially for a champion like her. It was a Midtown police officer's job to wipe the ass of the city, but Baby took more shit the past few days than a field of miltank. She earned the right to stand alongside the best, or rather, the worst of them. The streets were never fair, caring, or understanding, but once in a while, they took care of their own. There was an eye in the middle of the shit storm. She just needed to lift her chin up enough to see it. That's where he came in.

"Hurry up," Zach said. "And bring those treats with you."

Picking up on the clue, the gold star detective hurried over and hopped inside without a second thought. Poochyena like her couldn't resist a bone when it dangled in front of them. Zach turned to follow her.

"_What do you think you're doing_?" a voice asked.

Zach paused and slowly looked over his shoulder. The shadow with silver eyes had returned and now stood in the field of grass and metal several feet away. It reminded Zach of the horror movies he caught glimpses of in the park, the ones with a farmer holding a chainsaw at the edge of a cornfield. But he wasn't a scarecrow. Not anymore, and he had _her_ to thank for that. Zach spun away, flicking his coat tails at Pantera before he disappeared into the power plant. The darkness greeted him promptly, as did the "ouchies" and "Oh geez"s of a blind buffoon bumbling around.

Zach heard Baby stumble into something before he found her tottering on the edge of falling over. She'd bust a kneecap wandering around on her own so he snatched her by the wrist and pulled her along in the right direction. She didn't startle at the unexpected touch. Probably because the sound of his footsteps was enough to warn her of his approach. It would take time for their eyes to adjust to the dark, but Zach already knew how to see with and without his eyes. He didn't need Pantera for these sorts of things anymore. The echo of their footsteps off of the walls and ceiling helped him gauge the distance they needed to go. Every scuff of their feet told him the texture of the floor and their relative location. The energy hiding in the machines hummed and vibrated, warning of any imminent contact.

Hand in hand, they made their way through the catacombs of the plant. Zach eventually turned into the doorway of an electrical control room. Breaker boxes, electrical cabinets, and disconnects the size of dressers lined the walls. Clear plastic viewing panels revealed veins of wire and circuity inside. Coils, conduit, and conductors of varying grades snaked up the walls and into the ceiling. The space in the middle of the room was empty. White scratches in the concrete were all that remained of highly specialized and quickly pilfered equipment.

Zach stopped a step or two inside. Baby remained beside him and continued to grasp the sleeve of his jacket even when he released her. She saw even less than he did in the black windowless room and relied on his guidance for direction. Zach leaned over to the nearest machine and gently knocked on its metal sheeted side. Baby flinched at the unexpected noise and Zach snickered to himself. He couldn't wait to see what she did next. The knock vibrated through the thin metal of the machine, stirring the cluster of voltorb sleeping between the panel boxes. Dozens more were piled in and around the cabinets.

Zach accidentally stumbled across the hoard of orb pokemon while exploring the plant with Pantera. He thought the discovery would kill them both when the telltale sparks of a self-destruct began, but Pantera's soft heavy paws calmed the agitated orbs. She showed Zach how to quiet the tremors as well as invoke sparks without summoning the wrath of a long lost thunder god. It was risky business. Just one self-destruct and the whole place would blow up in a catastrophic chain reaction. But felines were masters in the art of provocation and Zach picked up a few new tricks. Life was short on the streets. Might as well enjoy it while they could.

The vibrations of his knock tickled the nearest voltorb from its dreams. It crackled with awakening energy and lit up the nook he was in with a dim yellow glow. The charge stimulated the voltorb next to it, causing the pokemon to shift with sleepy irritation. He too built a charge and buzzed softly with electricity, notifying his brethren that he wasn't ready to get out of bed just yet. The glow strengthened, filling the space with gentle light that pulsated with each lucid dream that passed between the pokemons' heads.

A different sort of chain reaction started and the room began to glow like a cave of hidden treasure. As each voltorb stirred more electric energy built within the room. It used the dustox dust clinging to the machine as a catalyst to take shape and direction. It morphed into soft yellow lines of energy fringed with a purple afterglow. The lines hummed and waved between the piles of pokemon. One voltorb, especially sensitive to disturbance, started to screech, but he was still heavy with sleep and the attack only amounted to a whistle.

Widely recognized as a defensive move among pokemon, other voltorb raised their voices until a melodious chorus bounced between the four walls. But today was a lazy day for the pokemon. They wouldn't make another move without the influence of another stimulus. The magnemite clinging to the ceiling, however, saw the building energy as an opportunity to recharge with little to no extra effort. They detached themselves from the wall and levitated closer to the ground. The positive and negative influences of their magnets amongst each other pushed the pokemon into a spiral formation.

The oscillating position of their poles, combined with the charge of the voltorb, magnetized the metal dust and debris scattered around the equipment. Shiny flecks of metal varying in size from powder to shrapnel rose into the air. Baby held out her arms in front of her. In the light of the pokemon, the hairs on her forearms began to stand on end. She couldn't see it but the tail of her braid and surrounding wisps of hair also floated about her in a weightless fashion. The smooth spell of zero gravity bathed her every movement in poise and elegance. She looked over at Zach and her eyes sparkled with the wonder of street magic. She wouldn't be able to resist standing on the sidelines for much longer. Zach nodded. Who was he to try and stop her?

With his approval, Baby let go of his sleeve and moved deeper into the metallic constellations. She reached out and tapped the closest piece of floating metal. It knocked into another that had an edge thin enough to cut glass. It brushed up against her jacket and cut a line across it. Baby didn't notice. The thought of getting cut to ribbons didn't cross her mind. Neither did inhaling toxic dust, being electrocuted by a swarm of wild pokemon, or blowing up Reynolds for a second time. There was only the shimmering fantasy spiraling around them.

Dustox dust had that effect on people. Its opioid like qualities eased all doubt and hesitation right before it poisoned you senseless. But a small dose like this wouldn't hurt. It might even relieve some of the pain Baby kept pretending she didn't feel. They weren't in any real danger anyway. The dustox wouldn't be back until morning after the street lights went out. The voltorb were half asleep and the magnemite weren't perturbed by the presence of humans as long as they didn't interfere with their electrical equilibrium.

Zach leaned against the doorframe and watched Baby's brazen curiosity get the best of her. She moved along the wall, counting the voltorb piled between the cabinets and dispensing poketreats for them to find later on when they woke up. An electrode shifted underneath the largest cluster, knocking a much smaller voltorb from its place at the top. Roughly the size of a pokeball, Baby reached out and caught it in one of the most casual crises averting caresses Zach had ever seen.

Still prone to agitation, the pokemon fluttered open an eye. Baby carefully held her finger to her lips and smiled, reassuring the pokemon that this was all just a dream. She smelled like prime poketreats so it had to be true. The voltorb fell back asleep with a screechy sigh. Baby whistled back, gently set the pokemon down, and subsequently saved them all from a fiery and explosive death.

Afterwards, she wisely retreated to the center of the room. The magnemite circled around her in a perfectly balanced ballet. Baby's braid swished back and forth with the rhythmic energy. She closed her eyes, stretched her arms into the stardust, and spun in sync with the pokemon. Zach leaned a little deeper into the doorframe and let the dust do its work. It sparkled and shimmered around Baby, spinning with her like she was the center of the universe. The way she moved was as natural as the energy coursing around them. Perfectly at ease in the midst of danger and perfectly out of tune, she looked happy and that made him happy.

Zach smiled. He thought it was funny. Baby came into his life like a hurricane, spinning everything he thought he knew about himself and the world on its head faster than a weather vane, but nothing about this moment felt wrong. In fact, it all felt incredibly right. In this place, with these pokemon, they could forget about the outside world, leave the madness and the darkness behind. But the outside was always trying to make its way in. Always.

"_They're coming_," a voice whispered in the dark. Zach ignored the shadow and focused on Baby. She opened her eyes and invited him to join her, keeping her movements small but enthusiastic, like a kid sharing a secret. Zach shook his head. She did enough cheering, giggling, and nonsense making for the both of them. Besides, he didn't need any more secrets.

"_We have to leave_," the voice said again.

Zach pawed at his ear. Now that Baby had stopped moving, some of the magnemite circled in closer. Her presence in the center must have acted like a grounding rod, channeling some invisible force between them. People were great conductors of electricity. It wouldn't be impossible for them to have some type of attractive force to the pokemon. If that was the case, maybe Baby didn't go around looking for stray pokemon as much as he thought she did. Maybe the stray pokemon were the ones who found her?

_"__You can't trust her_," the shadow behind him hissed. Zach dropped his smile.

"_What do you know_?" he barked back, keeping his eyes on the torch ahead even when the darkness slid in to whisper at his ear.

"_I know she's betrayed you_."

Baby wasn't capable of a poker bluff, let alone deceit. The woman in question sneezed and startled some of the voltorb into producing larger sparks. The crackle of electricity brightened the room for a moment, lighting up the edges of Pantera's face before she disappeared in the darkness again.

"_They will catch you_," she said.

"_Who_?" Zach questioned, a pinch of paranoia heightening his blood pressure.

"_The ones who make lightning_."

Zach turned his cheek into his shoulder with the statement. Make lightning? Was she talking about a pokemon? The movement turned his ear to the vast open passageways behind him. That's when he heard it. The outside coming in. Fast.

"_They're here_!"

Several beams of light appeared in the darkness, waving and shaking in the distance with the shudder of a hot pursuit. Zach recognized the rustle of armored vests, shuffling boots, and jingling utility belts anywhere. It was a raid. The police were coming for him. For Pantera. Zach whirled around and vanished into the darkness to confirm his suspicions. Pantera bounded after him. Back in the room, Baby spun around a couple more times before the dancing left her breathless and she swayed to a stop. Her smiled weakened when it fell upon an empty doorway.

"Zach?" she called. With no one to catch her mistake, she relapsed a little further. "Zachery?'

Baby ducked under a magnemite and trotted over to the empty doorway. Its solid black face paralyzed her for only a moment before she charged through and felt her way into a large production area. The high windows in the ceiling illuminated the space just enough for her to safely find her footing. Not that she needed to take another step. A heavy shadow hurried toward her with a fast paced: Step. Pause. Step.

Baby smiled as a set of shoulders carved a silver crescent out of the darkness. "There you are," she said, but Zach's silence seethed with palpable animosity. "What is it? What happened?" Baby's x-ray vision was so focused on what was in front of her that she never saw the Pantherian run by within an arms distance of her.

"Stop!" someone from across the plant shouted. "Stop right there!"

"Police!" another added.

Baby looked up at the flashing lights strobing in the background and sank about two inches. The way they had come in was blocked by a dozen or so star wielding vigilantes.

"You tricked me!" Zach snarled as he hobbled towards her. Once a checkered hat, always a checkered hat. He was a fool to think any of that had changed because of a couple of pokemon. "She told me not to trust you!"

"She?" Baby asked, snapping out of her daze.

Zach didn't make eye contact as he barreled past her. The innocent idiot charm wouldn't work on him anymore. "You lied to me!" he snarled.

"About what?" Baby tried again. "Just slow down a minute and talk to me!"

So she could stall until her buddies arrived? Yeah, right. Zach picked up speed. Drawn by the voices, several beams of light flashed in their direction. One fell on Baby who was positioned closer to them, and the rest quickly followed. She shielded her eyes from the light as much as the screams.

"Don't move!" they repeated. "On your knees!" "Police!"

Baby spotted Zach fading farther into the darkness. "Don't run!" she yelled. "It'll only make it worse!"

"Don't move!"

Baby bit her lip as the sound of several weapons being drawn replaced the screams. The white hot spotlight of a dozen flashlights burned the back of her neck. The raid had finally caught up to them. "I'm a cop," she loudly announced but the adrenaline of the raid was flowing at maximum capacity.

"On your knees!" the officers continued to shout. "Hands above your head!"

Baby closed her eyes, opened them with a shaky breath, and spread her fingers. She slowly raised them above her shoulders and set one knee after another on the ground. She fully intended to comply with their orders, but there was nothing like the rush of catching a criminal with your bare hands. One of the raiders, armed head to toe in black, tackled Baby from behind. She hit the ground and cut her cheek on a piece of metal. Three knees staked her through the back to keep her there. Someone wrenched her arms behind her back. Another flattened her face against the floor with their elbow, stabbing the metal through the rest of her cheek. Blood drooled from the corner of her mouth. Baby winked up through the tears welling in her eyes, but all she saw was darkness. Zach was gone and he didn't dare look back. He knew better than to stop and turn around. He learned from his mistakes. He ran as hard as he could for the nearest exit.

"_Don't run_?" Of course he would. The police were chasing him. The whole thing had been a trap to find out where he was hiding. Pantera tried to warn him.

But why not spring the trap back in the alley? What about the poketreats? Were they part of the ruse too? Baby must have known he would trust her, but he never gave her a reason too. Baby didn't know Pantera was with him. Maybe she didn't know the police were following her either? He didn't have time to figure it out. The only thing he could do was escape, survive, and sort through the details later. Up ahead, Pantera scaled the wall and escaped through a window.

Zach would have followed her if not for the clumsy fact that he was human. Instead, he shoved aside a pile of clutter and shimmed through a jammed emergency exit into a side yard filled with overgrown weeds and old benches. Zach tripped on some rubble on the way out and landed on a piece of cracked cement stained with a thousand cigarette butts. He glanced down the sides of the building. The exit discharged into the old break area near the rear side of the plant. Police raids generally covered all major points of exit and entry but Reynolds was too big and dangerous to cover them all.

With no blue and white knights in sight, Zach raced down the yard towards the plant's substation across the parking lot. There was a hole under the fence there where ground ridden pokemon snuck on and off of the property. One quick belly crawl and he'd slip down the gutter's gullet far enough to drop off the edge of the police's radar. If only his knee would stop aching. Zach grabbed his leg and pushed through the pain. He'd regret it later, but this was his chance to escape. The police didn't know the power plant like he did. Their puny flashlights would never breach the hollow depths of Reynold's fast enough to catch him. Stupid cocky checkerboard pawns. They'd never capture this king of the streets. A few more steps and checkmate!

"Halt!" a voice yelled.

If only it was in his head.

"Stop right there!"

A uniformed Midtown police officer tasked with watching the perimeter ran out in front him. Zach pounded to a stop. His coattails flapped up against his legs, tossing rain across the asphalt. The officer grabbed a pokeball from his belt and released a mightyena. Hair bristled and tail held high, the bite pokemon twitched in anticipation of an attack command. Zach held his breath waiting for the ravenous pinch of the pokemon's teeth on his arm, but both parties remained immobile. The officer didn't utter the command. He kept glancing back and forth between Zach and the blue jacket he was wearing. The color confused him somehow, but whatever gave him pause wouldn't last forever.

Zach had seconds to come up with a plan. He clenched and unclenched his hands. He needed to do something but he had no weapon. No bluff. Nothing to defend himself with but his own two hands. Mightyena growled. He wasn't confused in the slightest and his confidence was strong enough to snap the officer out of his stupor. He aimed the prongs of a stun gun at Zach's chest. They'd shock him senseless, but only if they made contact. Zach back stepped to move out of range and a twinge of pain shot up his bad leg. His knee gave out and his heavy ass hit the pavement with a splash.

"Don't move!" the officer yelled. Zach scuttled backwards to get out of the puddle. "I said don't move!"

Mightyena raced forward to add bite to his officer's bark. Pokemon and their damn attacks. Zach cursed them all. There was nothing he could do against the fangs of a well-trained fighter. All he saw was black. The black of mightyena's fur. The color of his future. The darkness of his past. And suddenly, he remembered that smooth sleek shadow undoubtedly watching from a distance. It watched because he commanded it too. That beautiful black encapsulating pitch capable of swallowing a man whole was waiting for _his_ command.

"Pantera!" Zach screamed.

Filled with ecstasy at her first summons, the cat sprinted across the parking lot and soared over Zach with the speed and fury of a pidgeot. She hit the ground running, teeth and claws flashing faster than a quick attack. The rush of her passing billowed mightyena's mane. He was still looking forward when the cat launched herself at the officer. Her teeth punched through both sides of his neck. Blood gushed into the air. Pantera landed on top of the officer and held him between her paws to seal in the suffocation. He kicked and cracked his heels against the pavement, unable to utter a single scream for help.

Holding nothing back, Pantera squeezed her jaws and quickly snapped the human's neck. By the time Mightyena turned around, his trainer was dead. The great black cat shook her fangs free of the worthless sack of bloodless bone and looked up at Mightyena. Her silver scythes cut off his head before he ever knew what happened. Zach scrambled to his feet and hobbled towards the fence.

"Come on!" he yelled, yanking back the fence. "Now's our chance!"

Pantera finished the hound with a crunch and bounced after her trainer, blood dripping from her chin. A smile across her face. She slipped underneath the gate and Zach quickly followed. They took off running side by side down the street. Zach ignored the sharp stabbing pain in his legs. He was high on too much adrenaline to give in to it. An MPD officer and his partner pokemon were dead because of him. Self-defense wouldn't work this time. He couldn't hide his involvement in Pantera's kills any more. Part of him didn't want to. With Pantera at his side, nothing could stand in their way. Nothing could stop them.

That's when Reynolds Power Plant exploded and blew everything he thought he knew about being a pokemon trainer to hell.


	17. Chapter 17

**Chapter 17**

They called Baby a terrorist, a scheming two faced psychopath hell bent on burning the Midtown Police Department from the inside out, and it was all his fault. Hat in hand, Zach dropped his forehead against the foggy window pane of Jack's Video and Electronics Store. Inside the display, various TV screens accosted viewers with the raw uncut footage of Reynolds Power Plant as it burned to the ground.

The flames impressed skeptics and pyromaniacs alike, proving that spewing your guts across the city once before didn't make the second wave any less nauseating. Smoke rose with tornadic proportions into the storm above and electricity streaked up and down the roaring vortex from both sides of the funnel. Lightning jumped from sky, to spire, to perimeter fence, sawing bodies in half with heat and light. It was a hellish plasma ball of metropolitan proportions, but instead of neon gas, it was filled with the smoke of burning flesh.

The rain, combined with the metal ingrained into the soil, turned the property into a giant electric chair, frying anyone who stepped inside. The bodies trapped inside of the fence couldn't escape the horror even in death. The electric current surging through the ground underneath them spontaneously caught their clothes on fire and they burned in small piles like vents in a haunted swamp.

Dirt and grass was not exception to the current. They burned from the bottom up, sending up more smoke signals for help, but there was nothing anybody could do for them. The fire was electrical in nature and wouldn't stop until the power was cut off. Which was a problem considering no one could get to the main series of disconnects without getting electrocuted by the weeds. It was a problem the city faced before, but never thought they'd face again because lightning wasn't supposed to strike the same place twice. Tell that to the arc flashes bouncing between the empty police cruisers and fire trucks. They hopped over various emergency responders who dropped dead the moment they stepped out of their vehicles. Their hero complex the cause of countless deaths. Dozens of wailing sirens and not a voice on the radio.

There was no emergency action plan, no escape procedures, nothing to prepare the city for another catastrophic electrical event because Reynolds Power Plant was supposed to be dead. Yet, in a single ear splitting millisecond it rose from the grave, screaming and clawing for any source of life to sustain its own. For years, it was left unchecked to harvest lightning strike after lightning strike without a single regulator or overflow current protector to slow it down. This much rage was ravenous and the plant showed no signs of slowing down. With a hundred or so storm systems in the bank, Reynolds was ready to put up a fight worthy of the undead flesh eating monster it had become.

The scream of its rebirth shattered windows, busted pipes, and knocked out more than half of the power in the city. Anything still hardwired into the old feed lines originally serviced by the plant suddenly reenergized, blowing every transformer, power line, and electrical box for miles. Street lights, traffic lights and security features alike overloaded and shorted, dousing the streets in unprotected darkness.

Car crashes echoed throughout Midtown, popping at every intersection with the ferocity of a hot bag of popcorn. Down in the bottom right corner of the electronics display, a box set television flashed with new footage of the calamity. A dozen domestic fires had broken out across the city, forcing citizens from their homes. People flooded the streets from the chaos, fleeing, looting and preaching on every street corner because the end times had come.

One field reporter attempted to interview citizens, but whoever wasn't crying because of their injuries, were wailing because of the ones they saw and staring wide eyed at a large chunks of manufactured metal that had punched through their living room wall. A different news channel knew the task of wrangling in the public was impossible so they switched their focus from the living to the dead.

Their cameras turned toward the black plastic body bags that lined the sidewalk a block or so away from the power plant. The stack would have been three deep if the blast radius hadn't incinerated a majority of the bodies. The rest couldn't be touched because of the electric current coursing through their veins. One reporter found a bed of bodies the officials hadn't gotten to yet. Someone had draped white sheets over the corpses, but they failed to cover the nature of the victim's deaths.

Blood soaked through the fabric, some in noticeable blotches and sagging fabric where large chunks of flesh or limbs were missing. Others were patterned in a variety of spots where the victim had been peppered with enough shrapnel to best a paper snowflake. Zach would've owned a tombstone in that graveyard had Pantera not jumped on his back moments before the concussion and served him a helping of asphalt instead of slag and steel. Although, there was nothing she could do about the blood dripping from his ears.

The world still sounded muffled, but Zach's hearing was a small price to pay given that the body count ticked by with the seconds. There weren't enough stretchers to whisk the dead away fast enough before the news crews caught hauntingly graphic images of pale limp hands dangling over the sides of the gurneys and waving their last goodbyes to viewers. Souls with less sentiment pointed their stiff crooked fingers at the camera in one final act of condemnation. Some thrice be damned.

Those victims knew the identity of the one truly responsible for such evil, but dead men tell no tales. Not a single person standing in front of the shanty window display of stolen electronics suspected that a criminal stood amongst them. They didn't care that a stranger smelled like burning metal or looked like he'd just run a marathon with a heart condition. Haggard instability was a rational approach to the rest of the populace's pandemonium in the explosion's aftermath. Nothing short of imminent danger could break the Technicolor glow of the city's biggest failure being broadcast in HD across the region. People crowded around each other, bumping shoulders like a mound of diglett trying to evolve into a dugtrio, constantly popping up and down on their heels for a better look.

Zach glanced over his shoulder and growled, establishing his territory with a vein popping glare. An inch of distance quickly spread between them. The other viewers wouldn't challenge his seat by the window if they could still see the red, blue, and white lights inducing seizures in the background of all seven live broadcasts. Zach turned his attention back to the screen and shuddered from the latest news reel as much as the loss of adrenaline.

The camera angles were different and each news channel played to a different demographic, but they all said the same thing: Officer Annie Cofield of the Midtown Police Department, harbinger of death, mayhem, and destruction, lie at the heart of the investigation into the disaster. They blamed her for everything: the explosion, the power outage, the gaping hole in the brick wall of the nearby grocer, and the rivers of broken glass clinking down the gutters. They had an excuse for everything she allegedly did, and the more outrageous it was, the more viewers they got. Their shocking claims picked up speed at heart stopping rates, all because of a meek 120 pound lover of the law that nobody saw coming. The mad scientist who created a monster.

"It is suspected that the explosion was a revenge plot aimed at the police department for the ill planned drug raid that her father's death several years ago," the newscaster in the tailored yellow shirt on the center screen claimed. "A raid not unlike the one that has now resulted in the deaths of at least nine Midtown Police Officers, five emergency workers, and twenty-seven critical injuries, numbers which continue to climb at unprecedented rates. It is believed that Officer Cofield's intimate knowledge of the department and her ability to tamper with evidence allowed her to evade notice for so long."

Zach wanted to strangle that loud mouthed hypno by her oversized pearls. She had no right to talk about Baby like that. None of them did, yet they continued to paint her in the blackest of colors with their reedy pale well-manicured hands.

"This ripple of chaos will no doubt touch the hearts of every soul in Midtown, especially those still reeling from the scars of the original explosion," the newscaster continued. "The exact cause of the explosion is still unknown, but it is believed that several pokemon were unwillingly involved in the detonation."

Voltorb were a nuisance in any electrical box, especially a power plant. They weren't sacrificial pawns to some maniacal scheme. They also didn't take kindly to rude awakenings and a military grade boot to the face was pretty damn disrespectful. The city's brilliant scheme to charge head first into an electric pokemon hotspot without doing their research was bound to fail catastrophically. What did they think would happen? Those idiots blew themselves up, which automatically meant they deserved a memorial parade. Zach only knew of one hero in this city and they treated her like the villain. They ripped through her professional life with such ferocity that there was nothing but juicy personal tidbits left and the media had an insatiable appetite.

Brow furrowed and eyes intent on the camera, the newscaster couldn't afford to miss a single defaming syllable if she wanted to maintain viewers. "Reports of strange and hostile behavior have come to light regarding Officer Cofield's time at the academy," she explained, "Especially her interest and proficiency in ceremonial firearms training and historical weapons."

Baby wasn't just a gunslinger, she was a bonafide sharp shooter. If she wanted someone dead, she wouldn't go around planting bombs or traps. Zach banged his head against the window as a nauseous wince of guilt bent him in two. Back in the power plant before the explosion, he called Baby a traitor and a liar. He was no better than the rest of the cosmetic coated film stars spewing pestilence into the ears of the region.

"Debate over the Department's ability to screen candidates for service has come under scrutiny, specifically their inability to identify psychological trends in candidates that could lead to potentially violent behavior. Just earlier this week, Officer Cofield was questioned by the Department of Internal Affairs for the reckless endangerment of fellow Officer Michael Guerra, a 10 year veteran of the 112th precinct who is currently filing a lawsuit against her for the incident that sent him to the hospital with critical injuries. An incident which is also thought to be connected to the death of Midtown's beloved Ace Trainer, Luke Quinby, also known as-," a no good warmongering titty trainer.

Zach clenched his teeth instead of the sharp ache that suddenly resurfaced in his knee. That ball sucker was dead long before anybody ever knocked on his door and Baby was the one who saved her pants wetting partner from a mauling. Just what sort of slander was the city's best and brightest spewing now? That no toddler, teen, or tottering old man was safe from her evil clutches? Baby was the only one who ever gave a damn about the real people of this city: the depraved, forlorn, and forgotten. The ones nobody cared about until voting season came around.

Baby's academy photo came up on screen and hovered over the reporter's shoulder. "Cofield was immediately suspended pending the investigation, surrendering both her badge and her weapon days before the explosion took place."

Zach placed his hand on the window above Baby's picture. He didn't know she had been suspended. Was that why she ended up in his alley? Zach never asked why she ran away from home. Now, he'd never get the chance because she was blown up into a thousand little pieces by the metal star shards she loved so much. Then again, if he escaped, she might have too. How else would they know she was there when the plant exploded? Zach pressed both hands against the glass. He needed to get closer.

"Questions are being raised as to whether more stringent measures should have been taken after the incident given Cofield's suspected involvement in the Midtown Murders."

Involvement? Baby solved the damn case. She knew there was a Pantherian involved before anyone else ever suspected it was a pokemon. Zach didn't think the defaming could get any worse until it spread to the whole Cofield family name.

"The seeds of instability can be traced back to a series of domestic incidents in the Cofield family household that led to an abrupt and traumatic split between Annie's mother and father. The subject of discord was none other than the Cofield obsession with the badge. An obsession inherited from her grandfather, Arthur Cornelius Cofield, whose reputation has been questioned throughout his entire career and whose mania no doubt filled the void left by Annie's mother when she walked out on the family years ago. The commissioner is expected to release a statement later today-,"

And say what? That Baby was crazy? A criminal? Zach scratched his nails against the glass. Baby was supposed to be one of their own. The very best of them. How could they betray her like that? She gave up everything for them. He glanced down at a smaller television set near the bottom of the display. Its bright red and white breaking news bar captured the headline nobody else dared while there was still so much scandal taking place. It scrolled by underneath Baby's academy photo screaming: "MIDTOWN MURDERER ARRESTED."

Zach snarled and pounded his fists against the window, startling several onlookers and splitting cracks across the pane. Baby was innocent! He was the one they were after. They were supposed to be talking about him, not her. This was a witch hunt. Pure madness. Zach whirled away from the window, rammed a smaller unsuspecting bystander off of the curb, and stormed out into the darkened street. His canine teeth pierced the tight line of his clenched rage. If he didn't forget about Baby now, he might just explode with the same ferocity as Reynolds. It was the only way he'd survive this insanity. What did he care about what happened to a novice reckless checkered hat anyway? Baby was a thorn in his side since the beginning. She was annoying, persistent, and too god damn cheery for his tastes.

He wasn't obligated to help her. She was alive and that alone should have cleared his conscious. So why wouldn't the voices in his head shut up? Zach clamped his hands over his ears. His fingers scratched the dried blood stains down his neck. Even if he wanted to, he couldn't reveal the truth. He'd be arrested on sight. Every single one of those checkered hats hated him, every single one except the one that mattered most, and she currently held his spot in a jail cell. Baby survived the explosion only to get thrown into the tar pits of the justice system with no weapons to defend herself. A novice like her wouldn't know how to swim in the sticky suffocating waters politicians bathed in. She'd drown in that vile muck because of him.

Zach smacked his hands against the side of his head. He couldn't think like that. Baby was his black marheep as much as the city's. She was the perfect pin cushion for every malady of conscious. It wasn't the first time she offered him his freedom at the expense of her own. No one else would make such a willing sacrifice. Who was he to squander it? Baby would be fine. She was still in her home away from home after all, the police station. All Zach had to do was take advantage of her precious gift and escape, but where would he go? Reynold's was swarming with uniformed personnel. People flooded the streets and stores, buying up all of the bread, laundry detergent, and toilet paper in the grocery store. He could go back to his old alley, but there wasn't anything left there but the smell of blood and brick.

Zach would have to leave Midtown. Maybe even Birkdale itself if he wanted to escape. It wouldn't be easy, but he'd done it before, and this time, he wouldn't be alone. He had Pantera to protect him. Baby would be fine. Three square meals a day, hot showers, and a new fashionable striped uniform, she'd be better off behind bars than in that ratty cupboard she called a home. A life on the inside was much more promising than what awaited her on the outside. Even with all of Baby's speed and endurance, she'd never outpace the lies burning her reputation to the ground. Even if the truth came out, the media wouldn't be swayed from their story unless there was a bigger conspiracy to blast through their microphones. Baby would be infamous before the night was through. Officer Annie Cofield: Extremist. Conniver. Killer. But what did he care?

Zach threw his hands down and thrust them into his pockets. He splashed ahead and the sound of his steps grew softer until they stopped all together. The chatter of the TVs quieted. The screams of discord faded into the background. Then, there was only the sound of the rain in the darkness. A single street light flickered to life along the sidewalk just out of reach of the electronics store. Zach stood frozen in the middle of the street beyond it, paralyzed by the thunderbolt that had struck him.

He looked down at his left pocket and slowly pulled out the spheal bandana hidden inside. It dangled limply in his hand, catching raindrops like crystals. Zach carefully stroked them away. Some of the patterning on the bandana had begun to fade. A few wrinkles were becoming permanent, but despite being a little worn and weary, the bandana diligently fought to keep him warm and dry in the storm. Just like its owner.

Zach closed his eyes and gently hid his face in the bandana. It never failed. Anytime he tried to run, Baby found a way to catch him by the coattails. He didn't understand. Strays weren't supposed to care for anybody but themselves, but that damn poochyena had to go and make him feel special, like he was something worth chasing after. Damn her. Damn her to hell like the devil she was. Zach lowered the bandana from his face. He couldn't leave Baby behind. Not ever again. But how could he help her when she was already banging handcuffs against the bars down at the precinct?

With such a high profile case, the moment the car crashes cleared, those mallet knocking bozos would spirit her away to some asylum where she'd never be seen or heard from again. Baby was too innocent and kind to fight for her own life. Those psychopaths, psychiatrists, and politicians would rip her to shreds. It would be an absolute blood bath. Zach couldn't let that happen.

He pulled the bandana between his hands and started rolling and unrolling it around his knuckles. He wasn't smart enough to scheme, but if he survived this long, he should be able to come up with something, anything, to save her. Zach glanced up in the direction of Reynolds Power Plant. The storm was still pregnant with a double downpour so the clouds hung low over the tips of the tallest skyscrapers. Reynolds may have been a skeleton but her bones rose high into the skyline. They had to if they wanted to harness the power of the gods.

The fires inside the spires didn't rise above the city, but the low hanging clouds still caught their glow. In the right light, they even flickered with the blue and white lights of the emergency vehicles swarming below. Zach rolled his hands a little faster. If every acronym in the alphabet was working the chaos in the street then they wouldn't be at home twiddling their thumbs. A disaster as momentous as this required all boots on the ground, not on top of a desk. Midtown PD couldn't afford a single empty checkered square on the board, especially not for the menial task of babysitting an incapacitated suspect in a locked detention cell.

The cops would never expect Midtown's most wanted to waltz in through the front door. They wouldn't recognize him under such brazen lunacy. Zach rolled the bandana with new zeal. Yes, he'd walk right in, maybe even ask for directions to sell the part. They'd never expect him to attempt a breakout. There'd only be a few guards to man the station, but given the amount of chaos running wild, what few guards remained would be armed to the teeth, quite literally when it came to their partner pokemon. Then, there was the issue of the jail cell itself. If he couldn't find a key, he'd have to find a way to break it down.

Outmanned, outmatched, outclassed, and under equipped, he'd need an army to break through their defenses. Zach stopped rolling the bandana. Or maybe just an army of one. He looked up at the flickering street light nearby. Darkness stalked the edge on the other side. Zach didn't have to see Pantera to know that she was there, watching, waiting. Always waiting. He need only say the command. Zach lowered his hands and turned to face the darkness, eyes as deep as the night.

Swirling clouds of steam rose up from the pavement underneath the narrow umbrella of light. They played with the whiskers of the great black Pantherian as she teased the line of materialization. She positioned herself under the line of light so that it cast sharp angles down her face, hiding her eyes and lower jaw with the shadow of a skull. The summons was answered. She had only one question. It was a whisper, barely discernable from her foot falls, but Zach head it loud and clear inside of his mind. It spoke of one thing and one thing only:

Murder.

Zach pulled down the bill of his hat so that it covered his eyes. Unlike Baby, he wasn't an innocent. He was a criminal by choice. What he did next was also his choice. Just a couple of days ago, he never would've considered it, but that was when he had nothing to lose. Things were different now. He had something worth chasing after. Zach tightly clutched the bandana in his fist. Baby wouldn't approve, but what she didn't know didn't hurt her, especially if she never saw it coming and tonight, the city was as black as sin.

Pantera slowly pulled her lips back in a wide razor tipped smile. "Are we going to play a game?" she asked.

Zach carefully tucked the bandana into his pocket and lifted his head, eyes flashing like a pair of cold silver scythes. "Yes," he said. "And I think you're going to like it."


	18. Chapter 18

**Chapter 18**

Midtown police officer, Oswald Jones, wasn't much of a gambler. Therefore, he didn't appreciate it when life slapped his world around like the tumblers in a slot machine.

"Stop playing around and help me with this," Officer Jones demanded as he slung a large cardboard box onto the nearest unmanned detective's desk.

Dusty mechanical parts bubbled out of the top of the box and onto the desk, spilling case files and paperclips across the coffee stained linoleum. Photographs of blood sullied floors and chalk lines fluttered gracefully to the floor. Pulling on the same string of curses and oaths, fellow police officer, Leonard McKowski, shoved aside a similar stack of R rated clutter to access the various antenna, radios, and switchboards that served as the police station's central internal communication hub.

"I can barely help myself," Officer McKowski replied as he dawned a headset that fit unevenly over his ears. "Jenny left the radio to help Central dispatch and I don't know what the hell I'm doing." A short stint as a repairman and suddenly he was an electrician. Just looking at the hotwired mess was enough to go cross-eyed.

Back in the bull pen, Officer Jones corralled a heap of barcoded hand-me-downs on top of some pending warrants. Maybe the oversized glow in the dark buttons on the handheld radios would simplify the task of finding the criminals underneath. One radio, still nacreous from its trip to the future, fell over and knocked several others to the floor. The brittle plastic achieved its dream of becoming a 200 piece puzzle in a matter of seconds. Another radio, the size of a man's foot, shattered under the pressure of Jones' clenched fist. He threw the tiddlywinks clinging to his palm back into the box and subsequently hit himself with the recoil.

Sky rocking from disgruntled to hostile, the officer skirted the edges of a municipal postal rampage. "This equipment is prehistoric!" Jones yelled. "How the hell do they expect us to use it? We're not trained to handle the apocalypse."

"What did you expect, a trial run with the seven deadly plagues?" McKowski chuckled to himself, partially out of hysteria. He plugged a connection into the wrong port and earned a sparking bite on his hand. The overhead emergency lights dimmed with the sudden power flux.

"Careful Cowski," Jones barked, eyes grazing the ceiling. "We've only got one generator left. If this one blows, we'll all be working in the red light district."

"Easy for you to say," McKowski chirped back. "None of this stuff is labeled. It's like playing pickup sticks with live wire." He flipped a switch, despite much groaning of the machines, and restored power to the landlines. Only three telephones survived the nuclear sized EMP that knocked out nearly all of the communication towers in Midtown. All of which started ringing at once to make up for lost time when they were reconnected.

Straddled between them, Officer Jones flinched and put his hands to his ears. "Arceus above. Turn it off Cowski!"

"I'm trying, I'm trying! But they're hard wired into the original system," McKowski explained. "If I shut them down, the radio goes with it." And a dozen officers would be stranded in the middle of a crisis. Not even Jones' temper could refute that point, but that didn't mean he couldn't gripe and moan about it anyway.

"I can't think with all of this noise," he complained. His fellow officers would've said he didn't think at all considering the label on the side of the second box he picked up read "Out of Service." But desperate times called for unreasonable measures. Jones lifted the box and the bottom fell out, vomiting circuit boards and cooper innards across the floor.

"To muck with this garbage!" Jones snarled as he threw the box against the desk. He kicked through the fabricated refuse to stand in line of sight of the dispatch desk. Maybe if his partner saw the struggle beyond the wall of glowing dots, he'd sympathize a little more. "We can't run the whole precinct by ourselves."

"They need everybody they can spare in the city," McKowski reminded with prompt dismissal. "Haven't you seen the news? It looks like a war zone out there. The power plant's raging out of control."

"That's why we need to be out there, not stuck in here tinkering with broken toys!" Jones threw his arm in the direction of the front entrance. A wall of dirty scratched safety glass separated their bleak reality from his glorious ambitions. "We're missing all of the action!"

"Leave your post and Lipton will nail your ass to the floor," McKowski warned, not bothering to lift his eyes from the wavelengths bouncing in front of him. He adjusted a wire and voices crackled through the radio. Pokemon be praised.

"Lipton can kiss my feebas," Jones continued, slanting his eyes with discontent, yet making no move for the door.

McKowski touched his headset and lifted his eyebrows as if turning an antenna for a better signal. "At least Lipton gives us orders and isn't afraid to get his hands dirty," he absently continued. "He's probably out in the thick of it now, screaming flamethrowers at ever badge and civilian he can lay his eyes on. Not like that coward Blanchard who tucked tail into some urgent city council meeting and hasn't been heard from since."

Officer Jones continued to stare at the door with the hopes that a competent commanding officer would ride in on the back of an arcanine and lead them all to the promotions they deserved. Answering the summons, a round waisted officer strolled in from the hallway with a soda bottle in one hand and a dirty napkin in the other. Jones would have crushed another radio in his fist had he been holding one. "And where the hell have you been?" he barked.

Officer Cody Miller raised a choice finger at the accusatory glare circumventing his previous whereabouts. "Earn a few more stripes, then you can question me all you want," he spat just as quickly.

"Quiet!" McKowski suddenly yelled from within his statically charged burrow. "I think something's coming through!" He stared off into the wall, hand outstretched to a dial. It popped, flickering the lights again. All three officers jumped and McKowski tore off his headset.

"Son of a signal beam!" he winced. "I finally get through to someone and it sounds like an electabuzz orgy over there."

Having no desire to participate in such audible excursions, Officer Jones plowed his way through the bull pen back to the storage room. He made sure to shank Miller in the gut when he passed. "Make yourself useful and pick up the phone or something. I think your fat ass is capable of handling that."

Taking the hit with elastic ease, Miller tossed his greasy napkin in Jones' cardboard box and took a swig of his overtime elixir. Working a double late at night wasn't ideal, but with Jones in the back and McKowski at the radio, someone needed to watch the front desk, especially when it was empty. Two rows of plastic subway style chairs remained unoccupied on the other side of the glass in the public waiting area next to the front entrance.

The station was far enough away from the power plant that citizens weren't banging on the doors for sanctuary. Common grievances were already addressed during the day and the usual rabble didn't have to make their rounds when there was so much chaos to capitalize on in the city. It wouldn't be long until the slighted and entitled swarmed the gates, demanding restitution for the wrongs done to them, but until then, Miller planned to sit on his fat ass and settle in for the night.

With the city on fire and every available cop running overtime, answering the phone was the least of his concerns. Even on a normal day, phone calls took more effort than they were worth. Wrong numbers were just as frequent as cuss outs and there was always someone with a hot tip that would lead to the city's next big conspiracy theory. That last one might have earned some merit given Reynold's latest temper tantrum, but the precinct didn't have the patience or the people to deal with whiney complainers too scared to leave their sofas.

In a way, the explosion was the best thing that could've happened to their careers. No one would dare question a cop in the midst of rampaging anarchy. And if they did, lawless tyranny was the best excuse to throw the rule book out of the window. Order must be restored for the sake of civilization. No matter the cost. It only helped that they were in the business of protecting and saving lives. All sins would be forgiven this night and all nights to come for every first responder who could claim they were on duty when Reynolds rose from the dead. They would be heroes, even those like Miller who didn't have to lift a finger higher than his soda bottle. The only thing standing between him, an awards ceremony, and endless favors was the ring of the entryway bell. It jingled with the appearance of a visitor.

In response, the light above the door flickered. Fuzzy black and white security footage captured an apparition as it took shape underneath the shivering light. Rainwater dripped from the bottom of a blue trench coat and formed a puddle on the curling linoleum beneath it. Each inky drop quieted the ringing of the telephone and the buzzing of the fluorescent bulbs until there was nothing left but the soft sound of a pair of military combat boots wading through the spreading water.

Officer Miller didn't bother to look up when the bell rang. He already knew what type of visitor had walked through the door by the odor wafting toward the window. Musty ripe trash can couldn't be washed away in the rain no matter how hard it fell. Miller slammed his soda bottle loudly on the desk. He wasn't in the mood to scrape homeless spit wads out from underneath the plastic gumball colored chairs. Nor were the chairs prepared for such an assault. They shrank away from the visitor whose black arching shoulders filled the aisle with its passing.

One by one, the overhead lights dimmed trying to illuminate the figure as it approached. They frantically splashed light down its back, but the crevices of its jacket were too sturdy to break. The folds sharply tossed dark shapes across the visitor's body. They flipped from left to right in time with the slow calculated swagger of his gait. Step. Pause. Step.

The visitor eased to a stop in front of the greeting window. He spoke no introduction. Made no demand. No nothing. There was only another flicker of the lights. Unable to postpone the interaction any longer, Miller tossed up his eyes. The heavy lines of a tactical jacket, unbuttoned and dusted with combat, caught his gaze with a knife's edge, lifting his chin as if drawn across his throat.

The visitor was bigger than Miller expected. Rain doused his jacket, darkening his already saturated shadow. Not that the added weight meant anything to a man who looked like he could bench press twice his own body weight. The visitor kept his head down, revealing nothing underneath the bill of a blue baseball cap other than the stubble scarred chin of a seasoned ring fighter. A primordial hormone stiffened Miller's muscles in a reflex response. He froze and refused to blink. Years of sitting at the desk mindlessly addressing fruitless complaints were all that kept him from turning to stone completely.

"Can I help you?" Miller asked, sincerely hoping that he couldn't.

A small amused smile flicked across the visitor's face, much like a cat's tail right before it pounced. "I want to talk to Baby," the visitor said.

The tension in Miller's face dropped faster than the ends of his frown. Baby was no doubt some moniker for a gangster down in holding. Grunts and their nicknames. They had no shame. This rabble was no better than the rest. He merely took Miller by surprise because of the hour. There was nothing to be so scared of.

"I want to talk to Baby," the visitor repeated.

A swelling vein warmed the chill tickling the back of Miller's neck. This street rattata had some nerve making demands during a disaster like a lawyer in a cheap suit. "There aren't any babies here," Miller explained with a loose hold on his disgust. "It's a police station, not a hospital, so visiting hours have been suspended. Indefinitely."

Miller plopped down in his chair and spun away to address some imaginary paperwork. The blue ink from his pen bled through the pages, but he didn't stop. It was important to sustain the illusion that there were more important things to do than entertain a lonely grunt. Psychic attacks usually discouraged simple minded individuals, but the shadow across the desk continued the haunt the glass, chilling the air between them with the silence.

"Go home and come back tomorrow," Miller prompted. "Your buddy can wait until then." His breath began to frost with the words. "I said get lost," he clarified, willing his temper to warm his hands so that he could continue the lengthening scribble.

"I said I want to talk to Baby," the visitor persisted.

Miller slammed his pen onto the desk. The shock helped him feel his fingers. "Look. Nobody's getting in or out tonight so just go home. We've got bigger problems than you friend right now."

"You might be right about that."

The overhead lights flickered again, this time, much more heavily, drenching the room in darkness for a few seconds. The entry bell dinged again, but Miller didn't notice. He looked up at the ceiling, cursing the station's antiquity with the same ferocity as his fellow officer in the stockroom. Not one to miss a change in tone, Officer McKowski pulled off his headset and rose from his chair at the radio station.

"Jones? Miller? You alright out there?" he called.

"Stay in your hole, Cowski," Miller snapped back. "I can handle one pussy footed asshole." He flicked his disdain back onto the visitor, daring him to challenge the remark.

One of the lights in the lobby didn't recover from the power flux and hid a corner of the waiting area. It cast an even darker shadow upon the visitor, deepening his jacket from blue to black. The visitor leaned in a little closer and waved at McKowski to do the same. It was a gamble to indulge a snarky grunt in a battle of pride, but Miller was willing to take the chance and risk a little dignity. This was his house after all. His home territory. When Miller came close to the glass, the visitor lifted his head and revealed a pair of Persian perfect eyes, narrow and gleaming like a reaper's prized scythe.

"You afraid of the dark?" he asked.

Before Miller could reply, the shadows hiding in the corner suddenly launched across the lobby and into the glass, blowing out the overhead lights with a shriek and a shower of sparks.

Jones said it himself. It was the apocalypse, and none of them were trained to handle the devil.


End file.
